More, because BT makes an excellent point

B Taylor comments, and I'll reply:

So, be careful what you wish for. While disclosure rules of Bronx (and I guess the others) only require disclosure of what you have run, Bietz' article "The Case for Public Case Disclosure", Rostrum, May 2010 seems to read in favor of disclosing all in advance.

Advance disclosure will certainly eliminate the constructive speech prep-out. But as noted the small team inherits a new problem even more daunting, the task of "prep-up". Your two varsity LD sailors will now be facing prep for 60 H-W cases, a load of 30 each to share. While the H-W team’s prep load for Hud is about one case per person, sharing the prep. And note, whether the large teams choose to do this or not is not important -- the possibility they can, or might, will compel the competitive small team to work that much harder.

If disclosure is intended to help the small competitive team, then, as the coach of a small competitive team I’ll say stop helping us! This is not the help we need.

Apologies for the naivety and if this has been discussed before, but how about reinstating a tournament culture that declares the prep-out unethical? The debate community, prominent coaches and tournament organizers, can declare that the prep-out is unfair, and specifically sharing of flows for the purpose of gaining a competitive advantage (as opposed to educational) is unfair. This would need to be top-down, from coaches to their students, implementing a step-change in the customary activity at tournaments.

In industry we often use the 80-20 rule. You can't fix everything, but if you take care of the big things you've made a significant improvement. This would apply here -- there is no way to stop the informal disclosure that happens by word of mouth when students talk between rounds. But if you eliminate the sharing of detailed flows and curb the expectation that getting a prep-out advantage is OK, you'll go a long way to minimizing the disadvantage facing the little guy today.

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Et moi:

First of all, my irony may not have been apparent. I frankly do not think that most teams want to give up any advantage whatsoever, and I do not expect anyone to accept my challenge.

More importantly, back in the Good Old Days, what you describe is absolutely the world we lived in. On the old ld-l listserver, there was a long discussion of the ethics of judges/coaches—and teammates—sharing flows. In those days, I was a strong proponent of not giving my teams flows that I had observed. This was, in fact, the norm. In a fifteen years, we have come to this.

I think the point of disclosure is to cover the fact that big, powerful teams have an advantage (an undeniable fact, regardless of its source) and to attempt to lessen that advantage. I certainly don't think the proponents, whom I consider friends, are in this mendaciously. Nonetheless, my feeling is that at this point the arguments in favor of disclosure fail on their own alleged merits. The discussion of what LD is, or has become, is a bigger and, perhaps, more interesting, albeit less controllable discussion, insofar as I don't know what we can do about it. The disclosure people are taking the step because they firmly believe it is a good thing for all, no question in my mind about that. My point with the original posting earlier was that, from everything I've seen, it's much ado about very little.