The post from Aaron on any legal issues, and the responses, are worth reading in detail, if you're thinking about the legality business. (This was never one of mine, to be honest; in fact, I was the one wanting the wiki to go on in perpetuity, if it were to go on at all.)
One point that can be easily resolved is discussed in the responses, namely that this whole business is a big-school push, over the bodies of the madly protesting poor little schools. In the postgame survey, all Cruz has to do is ask each school, overall, two questions: are they a big school or a small school, and do they feel that this system helped or hurt them. It certainly is curious that, if this whole thing were in aid of helping small schools, small school students seem curiously opposed, at least the ones that have posted, while no one from a big school has been anything but enthusiastic. I will point out, again, that as a coach of a small team, I remain agnostic, and appreciate the opportunity to study it at the Bronx. My agnosticism does not stop me from questioning it, however, and I think that, when this discussion plays down, we'll all have a good sense of what to look at in the postgame.
Fun stuff.
I'll answer Dunay's reply to my last post in a day or two. If anyone else wants to give it a shot (either he missed my point or I didn't make it particularly well), have at it.
Another side issue that arises is the right of tournament directors to do whatever they want with their tournaments. This is absolutely true, but must be considered in the Spiderman context: with great power comes great responsibility. A very small number of people run octo-bid tournaments, which exercise an very big sway over the activity. So does TOC. How these tournaments are run has a great influence on the activity, up and down the line. While their directors are perfectly within their rights to do whatever they please, the effects are felt far beyond their own tournaments. Relying on some Hegelian claim of synthesis and claiming the corrective that people won't attend something as important to many debaters as an octos tournament over principle is fairly unlikely. They'll suck it up. This failure to boycott the tournament arises because of a CBA deciding that accepting the unloved aspect of the tournament is outweighed by the chance to get a bid, or breathe that air, despite the unloved aspect. At the point where enough octos people are promoting the unloved aspect, it becomes common law, but please don't make the mistake that it has also become loved.
3 comments:
With respect, I thought Matt responded to your point well. So, if there's something we're missing, please tell us the argument again!
"The reason one should have to disclose their case after it is run is because breaking a case puts it in the public domain. A wiki just makes it accessible to all even if not every team has the resources to be present when that case is broken. The whole point of disclosure is make what is already technically "public information" more accessible to those for whom information is harder to come by.
Also, as far as I am concerned, until a case is broken, it is just not finished. Both in my coaching and debate experiences I have been in situations where cases were edited up until the start of a round. Having to disclose positions before they are even run makes little sense to me in light of this."
-Matt Dunay
I'll take a swing at some of this at least.
First, its not public domain because its only shown to a limited subset of people in round. The further spread of info is dependent on those people transmitting it. Remember, debate at large used to have strict colloquial rules against prepping out or sharing flows. This is no longer the case, but we seem to operate as if there is a direct correlation between is/ought in some of these circumstances. I also find the "people will get it anyway" to be an is/ought problem on some level. And even though I agree with Timmons that the privacy/legality issue is a non-starter, I think that debate cases aren't exactly public domain because of their totally limited value to the general public. If anything the appropriate metaphor is more like something akin to a business plan: someone wrote it, it was valuable to the writer, it is valuable to their opponents, but everyone else probably doesn't care at all. And even if there's no legal issue involved, it does seem to be a kind of strongarming or forcing of consent to many people. PARTICULARLY WHEN COMBINED WITH THE DISGUSTING, IMMORAL, AND ABSOLUTELY INFURIATING PRACTICE OF RUNNING DISCLOSURE THEORY. I'm sorry, I just get really angry at that. I can't understand why that's acceptable, and more importantly why the schools that do it haven't explicated their position. It seems to me like the ultimate in slimy, vacuous chicaneries, and definitely doesn't participate in any sort of actual debate about the resolution or even in my opinion a proper debate about debate.
Second, in terms of big school/small school, I just recently thought of this: without a caselist big schools are forced to diversify and spread out resources just like everyone else. Sure they might have more of them, but they still have to USE them in the same way. With a caselist the larger size of big schools ceases being simply a numeric advantage and starts becoming a structural one. Since everyone has the info, big schools can centralize more people/resources on the caselist than they ever could have when they had to individually research flows or seek out people to trade with (both of which are avenues open to smaller schools to some extent). Centralization of info/power is very troubling to me. I'm not sure if this is a totally valid concern, but I'd like to bring that up.
Third, in terms of the point that "positions aren't done until they're broken," I would argue that positions aren't ever done. Guess what, you edit cases in between rounds (or it sounds like you do) and in some cases people add or subtract certain parts of a case based on the circumstance. I feel that a caselist
A. will always be inaccurate for better debaters and teams since their actual text of cases will always be in flux anyway
B. won't even capture the "latest" version of most cases because people will most likely not edit the caselist on a minor level when they edit their case.
C. Obviously having to pre-disclose is preposterous. But the lessons of a caselist in my experience using one in NDT/CEDA were that they were inaccurate, deceptive, and just as likely to be totally useless. Best case scenario they gave you a "feel" for what your opponent can do and don't actually help you in any real way
D. Jim points out briefly that you still have the problem of breaking new cases. I'd take that one step further and argue that in the squo, no one's reliant on a caselist because they EXPECT there to be secret and weird stuff. In the possible future of mandated caselists, I think it builds a false confidence that we can have a 1:1 picture of the debate community on any given topic. The rhetoric and points that have been used in favor of a caselist so far seem to indicate a belief that this would be possible/close to possible. I don't think so. I'd rather my kids are wary at all times than assume that they can merely follow along the wiki and have everything they possibly need blocked. Most teams don't disclose offcase, theory, or frontlines/blocks, so you're getting some marginal percentage of the full picture anyway.
E. caselists for the reasons above (primarily in point D) replicate the current info sharing problem/don't improve on it in any meaningful way, but they could specifically worsen it by making the crucial info a smaller subset that more people are competing over. Imagine that people being sharing info in addition to the caselist because X team keeps rolling them on some awful theory argument (that they don't have to post to the caselist) and that they've frontlined to all hell. The crucial info to have would be the contents of the frontlines and the specific and potentially changing rhetoric of the theory. This is still info that either has to be bartered for or scouted. The fact that it is more specific info certainly provides the opportunity for schools with those scary "big" resources and teams to bring them to bear, get that info, and monopolize it from the rest of the community.
All in all, I would rather trust no one and have any sharing be some sort of temporary gentleperson's agreement than be forced to trust everyone and rely on the caselist's assumption of trustworthiness. In some ways it feels like it takes the decision on how to run my team out of my hands entirely. That's a nonrelated point, but it is frustrating.
while i think the distinction between public domain/private is a little grayer than it seems, i don't necessarily understand why that makes a caselist logically consequent.
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