I agree, Debra, that it would be impossible and in any event unhelpful to have any kind of back-and-forth between nominators and curators.

However, since there are established - albeit flexible - criteria for boost approvals, I feel it would be useful to have simply a short checklist of maybe 5 categories of 'Reason for rejection', even if number 5 is simply 'Other reason' (to be used only where necessary).

Sometimes with a rejection you have a strong sense of what was lacking. But often it's unclear which particular element(s) of a generally strong story caused it to be rejected.

I feel that would help refine the process, without requiring any direct dialogue between the two parties.

Presumably Curation keep a log of nominated but rejected stories, and must annotate at least some of these, for the purposes of inhouse standardisation meetings (as with school examiners), and for training and onboarding of new curators, which must be an ongoing process, especially as the BNP expands.

So the information is - I would hope! - being stored and categorised.

If filtered, valuable data is available at an organisation, but is not being made available to the relevant people and utilised to improve processes, that is a productivity and optimisation loss, in pure management terms, I would say.