This was, among other things, the first wet test of the NSDA virtual room system. And for most of the Northeast Traveling Tab Room, a first in-the-trenches working of a virtual tab. I’ll speak to the former first.
It works.
Now, on to the second thing. (No, just kidding.) I won’t go into the details of NSDA’s system of virtual rooms. I’ve got a marginal understanding of the underlying technology, and a general idea of how to use it in tabroom, but I don’t trust my knowledge enough so far to pretend to be able to explain it to others. The point is, it doesn’t really matter. In the event, you pair a round, and the system assigns them a room. Debaters and judges go into the rooms, and let fly the dogs of war. If there’s an issue, an admin can go into the room and sort things out. From my vantage point, issues were few and far between. Most people just hit their appropriate buttons, and it worked. For what it’s worth, the backend setup for tab staff to use the system looks mostly like just a couple more buttons setting up the tournament in tabroom. No big deal. My understanding is the NSDA will be using this system at NatNats, and there is no reason why they shouldn’t. I’d like to say that Massachusetts got the kinks out of it, but honestly, there weren’t any kinks beyond a few people not being able to connect because of non-unique issues on their end.
Ain’t that just a kick?
As for virtual tabbing, there we learned a lot, or maybe we just confirmed what the early pioneers already said. First of all, tabroom remains tabroom, aside from the fact that every time you run it someone has snuck in a few new buttons without telling you about it, but we’re used to that now. It’s everything else that has changed in a meaningful way.
We had a zoom room up for our tab room conversations. That is a must (although it doesn’t necessarily have to be zoom). We learned that the fewer people in the room the better. We had LD and PF and some general staff in one room, and it was occasionally cacophonous. At most relatively large events I’d isolate LD and PF and Policy from one another (unless the same people are doing them).
Since the system assigned rooms, we didn’t need to use the zoom breakout function. We did have room managers, though. These were people assigned to the rooms to make sure the rounds were really happening. You would think that seeing that the judge had pressed start would be enough, but I imagine there will always be judges who hit start independent of any sane definition of the word start, and that has to be accounted for. The room managers made sure each round was actually happening, and fixed the couple of tech problems that might have arisen. They reported back to us on a slack channel.
Slack was the app of choice for all backend communication other than tabbing. Essentially it was channels for each division, plus one for general and another for tech issues. Unfortunately everyone running the jernt was in all of them, and we’d be more specific next time. Again, cacophony is a possibility.
We had a judge room and a student room for hanging out, and a manager for each. Again these were in zoom, but that was happenstance, and presumably any system would work. Given that Chrome seems to be the default browser anyhow to run any system we’ve heard of so far, a Google room probably makes as much sense as anything else. Anyhow, when someone wasn’t in their round, presumably they’d be in the lounge. Other judges could be found if a replacement was necessary.
Finally, we single-flighted almost everything except an elim or two. That really helped. We had the time built in to get the job done.
In the aftermath, I couldn’t be more sanguine about the workability of virtual tournaments. And I’m guessing that they will be the norm for 2020-21. After that, they can become a backup (no snow cancellations) and an addition. Personally, I don’t really see tournaments being half virtual and half in-person; something about that intuitively doesn’t gel. And I don’t see in-person tournaments disappearing, because we’re all human beings and we are social animals. But as I’ve maintained from the start, I do see a new avenue to explore not out of necessity but, when the time is right, out of choice. That is going to be fun.
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