In response to surprisingly positive feedback to a quasi-satirical post, I have decided to gauge community interest (as well as ability) for creating a type of mobile app that would consolidate balloting as well as judge feedback into a single program that could more efficiently and effectively centralize these tasks. I have amicably dubbed this idea “Juju.” Partial credit for this idea must go to Sam Natale, who proposed electronic balloting. Understanding that I do not come from a tabbing background, nor do I possess the skills to turn this idea into a reality on my own, there are numerous benefits to an app such as this: 1. Balloting: Balloting under the SQ is inefficient at best. We rely on oft-hard to find ballot runners, or else use wing judges which takes away from debaters ability to get the full view of how judges saw the round. By automating this process, we consolidate the data into a single location where tab geniuses can more easily and quickly turn that around into the subsequent round’s draw. 2. Feedback: This is my primary purpose for creating this app. Judge feedback is one of the most essential elements to running a quality tournament. While ensuring that the best judges can be placed in the most important rooms at strategic points (i.e. bubbles) is one aspect of feedback, it is equally important that less significant, less skilled rooms are also given judges, specifically chairs, that are capable of providing meaningful feedback that will be most likely to help in their progression as debaters. Judge feedback is sometimes deemed extraneous, or too onerous for the benefits that it may bring. In the short run, this may be true, but with such an app we would be able to accumulate a long-term, comprehensive database of judge feedback that would be widely accessible. This does several things, which I believe helps to make BP/Worlds far more objective, and may even push us more towards the ideal of the average educated voter. First, John Patrick has often discussed the importance of knowing your judges in your ability to succeed, as judging can often be subjective. By allowing these reviews to be public, in a way similar to rating sites like Lulu or Yelp, we would equalize the playing field in terms of individual debaters abilities to pander to certain judges, to adopt certain styles in order to gain an advantage over other debaters due to the nature of limited knowledge. Second, I believe that this helps to undermine international biases that may exist. Such a database would potentially include judges from around the world, giving debaters insight into specific preferences that they may not be meeting due to limited international exposure. Finally, CA teams become more able to determine who should and should not be allowed to chair certain rooms based on past experience. This, for obvious reasons, has potential to increase the quality of judging pools, leading to more helpful feedback and creating conditions conducive to rapid regional improvement. The most obvious problem with this is the angry loser problem; when the team that gets the 4 in a given round may be unhappy while the teams that received higher ratings are proportionally happier. These teams have a higher potential to flood the database with bad feedback, undermining the efficacy of the information. I believe that a solution to this would be to create an inverse weighting mechanism within the app that would require reviewers to state their ranking in the round, weighting their feedback as being more credible if the team received a 1 and believed it was incorrect. Obviously teams that write poor reviews who received 4s would still be given some weight, it would just be proportionately less. This ensures that the accuracy of information given is as high as possible. There are other mechanisms to use to go about solving this problem, but as I am not a computer scientist, I will leave that up to others. 3. Environmental Benefits: Debate tournaments use an excessive amount of paper. This may be the UVM student in me speaking, but we as a community should be pushing more and more towards a paperless system (insofar as we still protect against cheating with the use of internet-accessible electronic devices). By using automated systems such as this, we reduce our carbon footprint and begin to do something about the environment, rather than just talking about it. This is a new idea that has received a fair amount of support. Obviously I have not thought of everything. I am very interested in everyones feedback, as well as ideas and concerns about creation and implementation that you may have. Please let me know if you or anyone you know has the means and the interest to make this a reality.
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 20:05:50 +0000
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