Feedback from Cork IV, by Bob and Ciaran
1) Can Team Position (1G, 1O, etc.) be included on the "Venue by Team" sheet from the print page.
2) Can the "Venue by Judge" sheet from the print page and the new "Venue by Team" sheet described at 1 be combined into a more compact sheet, perhaps featuring two columns, to be called a "floor manager sheet".
I think it's relatively clear why these are desirable. Any questions let me know.
3) A display should be accessible that clearly indicates which ballots have not yet been entered, including the venue name and location, chair judge in the room, and the average points of the teams in that room.
As things stand it is not easy to identify which rooms were outstanding. Bob and I found this difficult running an 80 team tournament - the problem will be greater during a 400 team tournament where it could be very easy to miss, and consequently not hurry people along, a room when scrolling up and down the 100 venues on the result entry sheet. I think it is obvious why it should contain the information described. Note that at least one floor manager will be needed to handle each "location" the most common I can't find my room problems arise where teams get a number or letter wrong but get the general area right and you need to have a guide there for that. These floor managers will need to have radio contact with someone with the authority to send Dummy teams to rooms and order debates to start, reassign missing judges and who has record of teams that are currently "lost" and "found". At Dublin I shared this role with the Tournament Director Jim McElroy. I don't know that we will have two such experienced adjudicators who we can leave out of our judging pool so we need to start thinking, DCAs and OrgComm, about how this function will be performed.
4) On the judge input "start-page", can the judges be sorted by rank.
This would make it considerably easier to edit the judges rankings accurately and to make sure we have the right people on the right scores, both in absolute terms and relatively.
5) Can the Manual Draw page appear in order of average team points for the room.
I think this has been done correctly on the initial draw page, but when you enter the Manual draw page the rooms appear by venue which is very frustrating
6) Re the hyperlinks on all the team names, Bob and I were wondering what these were supposed to point to.
At present they don't point to anything - may actually be an error page, can't remember - but we both agreed that this could have a benefit in terms of making some information about teams easily accessible.
7) When finalised, can the draw display be in keeping with the order in which the ballots are printed.
This would allow the paranoid amongst us to check to make sure we're not going to hand the ballots out to Location floor managers with one missing. They should continue to print by grouped by Location.
8) Could there be multiple user access levels?
So there would be an admin level which would have all the privileges of the current system and a data entry user, that would have access only to an amended input section that would not allow them Finalise the Results or input motions so that one of the Admin team would have to do this. This would have obvious advantages in terms of ensuring a data entry person doesn't mess anythign up by finalising something they shouldn't, but would also tighten security around sensitive information about who was top of the speaker tab, other standings, future motions, and motion bias data.
9) would it be possible to have the facility to link a particular team or judge to a particular venue permanently.
This would be great if we were to have any participants with any disabilities or mobility issues - which we did in Cork!
Derek Lande on the Tabbie Mailing list
1. Judge Allocation
1. The ability to mark some judges with a watch flag and some with a mentor flag. The tab should then do its best to allocate the watched judge to a mentor judge so that detailed feedback can be given.
2. When all watched individuals have been assigned to a mentor judge the tab should then attempt to assign a judge who has not judged with a mentor yet to the mentors room. This would probably necessitate a field being added to the judges record in the database recording how many times a judge has seen
3. Judges should have a boolean flag indicating whether they should be allowed to chair or not. There are some judges that I would rate as judges but view as incapable of chairing a discussion and vice-versa.
4. The tab should keep a record of the ranking of the room on the tab that each judge sees and attempt to rotate chairs between rooms of different strengths. This should be balanced against the need to keep good judges seeing contentious rooms. In particular this could be useful to rotate marginal chairs. Ie. Somebody who is chairing a low room one round should be given a chance to see a high round the next time.
5. Ideally manual judge redistribution should be possbile through a drag and drop mechanism.
1. There should be an unassigned pool that you can drop judges into.
2. There should be a button to clear all currently assigned chairs
3. There should be a button to clear all currently assigned panelists
4. There should be an option to take a partially completed assignment, lock those allocations and then have the tab autoallocate the remaining chairs and panelists to rooms.
6. The tab should be able to highlight contentious rooms when doing judge allocation. There should be colour codes for the highlights.
1. 1 colour representing safe rooms where all teams have already broken
2. 1 colour representing contentious rooms
3. 1 colour representing secondary contentious rooms (ESL/EFL/Novice breaks)
7. The tab should use this determination of contentiousness when making its own automatic allocation. In order of prioritty 1. Contentious 2. Secondary Break Contentious 3. Safe 4. Out of contention.
8. When you click on any judge in the tab an individual user profile should appear, detailing all judges who they have judged with. In particular highlighted should be the chairs of their rooms and mentor judges should be even further highlighted.
9. There should be a watch status screen that should display a list of all those currently marked to be watched. It should also display how many times they have been watched and by which mentors.
10. Panels should always be allocated in odd numbers. Eg. have a panel of 3 and a panel of 5 as opposed to panels of 4.
11. Any changes to judge rankings or other characteristics should contain an audit trail. It should show who made the change and the user should ideally be given the opportunity to add a narrative explaining the reason for the change.
2. Teams
1. Should be able to record whether a team is ESL/Novice and preferably other user customisable types of team. Eg. Some competitions only allow domestic teams to break etc.
2. If there have been complaints about a team or that teams has made complaints about their treatment there should be a watch option that would ensure that they receive a mentor class judge to judge them in the following round.
3. There should be a watch status screen that should display a list of all those currently marked to be watched. It should also display how many times they have been watched and by which mentors.
3. Architecture
1. Granular permissions should be possible, allowing users to log in and have different rights on the system.
1. Eg. Data entry only with no visibility of overall status
2. Adjudication team view who should not be able to enter results but see information that should not be visible to other views.. eg. whether somebody is marked as watched or not.
2. Every element in the database, physical rooms, teams, judges should have an option to click on it to see its full details. This should also include space for people to record comments. Ideally along with what user it was that added those comments. This would be particularly useful for tracking feedback.
4. Feedback management system
1. While not wanting to get into the realm of have feedback drive the judge allocations. A system whereby all feedback could be recorded in each individual judges profile, either through somebody capturing the key information or have somebody who scans the documents into the system.
2. This should include a workflow mechanism to ensure that the adjudication team has the ability to review all documents, see which documents have been reviewed and assign a priority level to the document to be considered