International competition for natural bathing waters
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The Pondy Award has been presented 2015 at the International Swimming Pond Congress and is awarded every 2 years. One winner from each of the following categories will be chosen:
A | Private swimming ponds |
B | Private natural pools |
C | Touristic natural swimming ponds and pools |
D | Public (municipal) pools with biological water treatment |
Awarded are the designers of a project, being the person (s) or the team who have created the design and water purification of the project, regardless of whether they also built the facility.
This makes the Pondy Award a design-focused competition.
For the purposes of this competition, “swimming ponds” are defined as naturally shaped natural swimming pools (NSPs), while “natural pools” are architecturally designed pools with biological water treatment.
Note that definitions may vary among national associations.
Terms and Conditions
All members of the associations affiliated to the IOB and the Extraordinary members are eligible to participate. It does not matter where the project is located in the world. It does not have to be in the country from which the candidate comes from. Each project may only participate once.
The quality of the facilities should be evaluated independently of the !photographic staging”. But you must show all the essential elements in sufficiently high resolution, as they are the basis for the evaluation.
Application documents
To enter the competition, you must complete the online application form in full. You can find the form here:
ONLINE-FORM
Once submitted, the form is automatically sent to our website administrator, who forwards the project details to the jury. To ensure a fair and impartial judging process, the administrator removes all references to the project’s designer or team before passing the materials to the jury. Only the website administrator has access to the full submitted data, sharing only the necessary information (such as images and project descriptions) with the jury. Details about the designer or architect are kept confidential until the winner in each category are chosen during the conference.
Only our web admin receives the submitted data. He only passes on the data necessary for the neutral evaluation of the project (pictures and explanations) to the jury. All information about the designer or architect is retained until the top three projects in each category have been selected.
How Winners Are Determined
A jury will determine three nominees per category.
To facilitate this, all project documents will be sorted by category and uploaded to a secure Dropbox folder accessible only to jury members. If fewer than three projects are submitted in a category, no nominations will be made, and no winner will be chosen for that category.
Whenever possible, the jury will include representatives from media outlets that cover the swimming pond industry, such as editors or publishers. No later than one month before the conference, the jury will select the three best projects in each category. These nominees will be announced by the IOB, and the participating media outlets (jury members) will have
the first right to publish information about the nominees, including full-size photos of the projects, which must be provided for this purpose.
The final winners—one per category—will be chosen by secret ballot during theInternational Swimming Pond Conference. Here’s how it works:
- Each conference participant will receive a ballot upon arrival at the venue.
- Each participant has four votes—one for each category.
- The ballot will list 12 options, labeled A1, A2, A3, A4 (for Category A), B1 through B4 (for Category B), C1 through C4 (for Category C), and D1 through D4 (for Category D).
- Posters of the nominated projects will be displayed at the congress venue,organized by category and labeled with the corresponding codes (e.g., A1, B2,etc.). To ensure impartial voting, the names of the designers or companies will remain hidden until the voting period ends.
- Participants must cast their votes by the lunch break on the first day of the congressand place their ballots in a designated urn.
- Jury members will count the votes and determine the winner in each category.
- The jury spokesperson will announce the winners during the gala evening of the congress, along with their final rankings.
After the vote, all nominees will be published on the IOB website. Participants whose projects were not selected as one of the top three in their category can also request to have their projects published on the IOB website as additional recognition for their participation.