The question was, how would we do with e-ballots with teams
spread out over multiple buildings on a big campus? We know that with everyone
in one building, like Bronx, if there’s a problem you can just go to the room
and solve it. But that wasn’t an option at Princeton. We did have some runners,
but in the main we were left to our own devices.
Literally.
First of all, we had 100% compliance insofar as everyone had
tabroom.com accounts. No one tried to be the lone Luddite, either by design or
by accident. Secondly, the weather was cooperative. No rain, no sleet, no
blizzard. So there were no subconscious threats keeping judges from showing up.
And third, I had made sure that the Tigger judges were aware that sleeping in
was not an option. Then again, getting a blast is different from having to show
up for a judge call. You can throw on pants and dash off to wherever at the
last minute if you have to. If they had to, they did.
We learned quickly on that, despite having sent clear
instructions before the tournament, and repeating those instructions in an
opening meeting, those instructions were not universally heeded. At the
beginning, if a round wasn’t started by the pressing of a button, we replaced
and fined the judge. We also kept both judges in the blast, noting the
replacement, so that everyone would know what was happening; we fined and
deleted the bad judge after the blast.
As it turned out, the problem was not absent judges, it was
judges who weren’t doing what we told them to do. The imposed fines drew them
all to tab to complain that they were there and shouldn’t be fined, at which
point I sat them down and gently lectured them on the disruption their not
following instructions had caused. They would indicate understanding of the
situation, and I would erase the fine. Lesson learned.
As the tournament progressed, we began to realize that our
real agent in getting things done was our phones. If a round hadn’t started, we
would simply text the judge and get an update, and if that failed, we would call;
after all, we have their information on tabroom. That combination did the job.
We got every round started pretty much on time, or close enough that we kept to
the schedule. I also started doing things like blasting unstarted judges five
minutes after the scheduled time to start their engines, and unfinished judges
to wrap things up fifteen minutes before the end time. Combining this with our
limited runner resources made it work. We turned tabroom into our private
panopticon with communication capabilities.
As I said, it worked. As a matter of fact, it worked so well that it
made the PF people jealous. Now they want to play our electronic game, and next year they
will. We probably won’t force it, as we did with LD, meaning that we might
allow the odd Luddite, on the belief that, first, in PF there are always some parent
judges too new to understand what we’re talking about, and second, that they’ll
learn pretty quickly that setting up an account and not having to walk all over
creation to pick up and drop off ballots is worth accepting that it we are now
well into the 21st century.
Of course, Palmer will crow that he told me so. But I firmly
believe that waiting until the time was right was important. The time was, and
is, right. Aside from venues that do not have decent wifi (i.e., half the high
schools we work in), e-ballots have arrived.
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