NSDA has officially announced NSDA Campus.
And away we go.
It remains early days for Rippin’, but their announcement is pretty gung-ho. Needless to say, the MSDL championships a couple of weeks ago was the real acid test, and Catholic Charlie and Kaz and I were all there in the trenches. The platform NSDA is using, jitsi, just works. It’s private and straightforward, and it works seamlessly with tabroom. We used it all this last weekend as our tab chat room at Byram Hills, and also for the rounds, both speech and debate. People had individual glitches, but what app doesn’t, and they were fixable. Everyone participated in all the rounds, except one yabbo who, when having problems, rather than fixing them, decided to pull their kids into their own private room on a different platform. Sigh. Some people just don’t get the idea that beta testing (and isn’t all virtual tournamenting beta testing at the moment?) requires a certain mindset other than Screw This, I’m Off to Neverland. They also don’t get that taking the first star to the right and straight on till morning does not solve the problem.
One thing that remains clear following the BH tournament is that, first, the day everyone reads the emails is the day I can announce that my work here is done (and there were only a couple of emails, so it wasn’t as if I was bombarding them), and second, the tournament that accepts independent entries is welcome to them. Lips that touch indies won’t touch mine. That will be my hard and fast rule going forward. They’re just not worth the hassle. Between their not showing up, and their lack of preparation and their lack of understanding of SOP, they suck the juice of life right out of you. I have a feeling I won’t get much argument on that, though. There will probably be plenty of virtual tournaments that will welcome anyone, which is fine if that’s what they want. In fact, I would like to see folks without teams get some chances to debate. I similarly feel that people who like to play tennis should be able to play tennis even if they’re not a member of the school tennis team. And so forth and so on, with arguments familiar to everyone by now.
The best thing about now having run 2 virtual tournaments is that I think we’re getting a real feel for procedures, which I’m working up for the Toolkit. Eventually I will publish it all, both here and on the site; so far all I’ve done is a quick stab on updating the instructions for participants, which, as noted, some people avoided religiously. Given that it’s my illustrated, laugh-a-minute material updated with a couple of virtuality notes, it’s both marvelously entertaining and it’s not even TL;DR. Whatever. Some people will never get it; it’s pointless to lose sleep over them.
Anyhow, some things on NSDA Campus remain uncertain, most primarily cost. It should cost something; bandwidth isn’t free, and tabroom.com is a busy hub. Whatever it is, I’m sure it won’t be prohibitive, and that it will be a lot less than the usual cost of custodians and the like. My guess is that the colleges that want to use it might have to pay a premium, and I feel that they should. So would John Locke, once he learned that tabroom is the NSDA’s property and that the colleges (with some exceptions, like Penn) are simply in the business of fundraising out of high school pockets for their own college business. What does worry me, but probably won’t really be a problem, is the possibility that the number of rooms available to a tournament might be limited. I think NSDA is a little worried about everything crashing around them. Probably a little more exposure and testing and they’ll get past that. We’ve already begun brainstorming other ways of handling virtual rooms if we must, but if you know a better one than an automated system where the room is built-in to the tab software, more power to you. I’ve seen Catholic Charlie on I think four different video platforms, and he looks the same every time. (If you have a platform where he looks decidedly better, on the other hand, please let me now. I’ll drop Campus like the proverbial hot pomme de terre.)
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