Week 36: Reading, Watching, Writing
Or Zoom, Gray map pins, and Steak
I went through my second online tournament reading last Saturday, this time in a Zoom environment. My thanks to GPQB for running the tournament and giving me a chance to get more practice with more tools. The tournament situation reinforced my earlier surmise that we need to get more readers involved in online competitions this year, because staffers are the one resource that is in shortest supply for events.
The problem remains that with people hesitant to run online events, there's simply fewer events. To achieve balance, the online events are larger. But that is stressing the pool of staffers, because not only do larger online tournaments demand more staff due to more rooms, they simply require more staff because they are online.
If your rule of thumb was previously you could run a tournament on 1-2 people a room, that number has gone up. A moderator has to learn 3 or 4 new systems for online competition: an online question viewer, online buzzer, scoresheet method, and meeting software, plus provide some level of security oversight. Not only does 1 staffer a room seem like recipe for trouble, but most tournaments are going to require a person constantly monitoring rooms and directing people to their next round, but that person can't be doing stats. To manage all the tasks effectively, tournaments have effectively moved from 1n+1 to 2n+2 staffers required, where n is the number of rooms.
My concern is how we are utilizing readers once they've been through the fire of online competitions. I'm also concerned whether these tournaments, once complete, are not cross-pollinating data as to what works and what doesn't with additional events. While it is improving the ability of organizations to run their second event, there are lots of organizations that have yet to run their first online event, who could benefit from the experiences of others.
My hope is that we can create a cadre of online-tested readers, who can then propagate their experience down to the smallest and most vulnerable local and league tournaments, so those hosts can feel secure enough to try online competition this year, and have it run competently. That hope is an unrealistic ideal, but the closer we approach that aspiration, the better off we will be.
I also got confirmation of another television program taking the year off, in Toledo. While their announcement seemed hopeful of a return next year, any disruption is worrisome. There's also a large number of stations which have not decided on a 2020 show strategy, which makes disruptions a possibility. Cleveland is apparently in that situation. But I was heartened to see that New England will be running the qualifying tests for their shows in January.
I keep a map of all local TV programs, and I turn the pins gray when there's a program which goes off the air. Because I have kept the data for this map for years, I've got a lot more gray pins than other colors. I'm just happy this year I'm not graying out every pin.
I've also been bitten by deprecated features this week. If it's not obvious that the past couple weeks are dragging on me, let me make it a little more obvious: rather than plan out what could be next week's newsletter, I was looking to take a stack of six articles I had written for the first book's facebook page, and ready them for content for the next six weeks. Well, I went back to the facebook page and discovered, since November 1, you couldn't use Notes any more. And if you left a draft Note unpublished, as I had done, well sorry, it had been set to visibility zero. Luckily I remembered that I had to have drafted the entire article series somewhere, so I searched my google drive for the title. There's some draft pages there, and I'm going to be able to recover most of it. That's good because the articles presage a lot of the themes I want to include in the second book. But as I type out this explanation of what's to come, I'm less enervated than I was. If I had completed articles to paste in here, I'd still be exhausted, and I'd just be going through the motions. But now, this is exciting, needing to put the old pieces together. I've got a little bit of purpose and something to say, spirits which I admit were starting to flag at week 36. So chastened by the obsolescence of tech and reminders that we are all mortal, I will rewrite the articles and begin publishing them next week. Get ready for The Steak Money Diaries.