Events 2018-2019

[bernard]

Regarding Sounds, you all will be able to see the rules 'real soon now'. I know some of you will be somewhat upset that they diverge in the ways they do from previous versions. We had some tough choices to make and had a relatively large, diverse, and very skilled team involved in making those choices and changes. We've come up with what I think is a good compromise between all the various competing interests.

Wait, what do you mean? Official rules that come out in september?

Yes, finalized events and rules are published digitally in September.

[dxu46]

Regarding Sounds, you all will be able to see the rules 'real soon now'. I know some of you will be somewhat upset that they diverge in the ways they do from previous versions. We had some tough choices to make and had a relatively large, diverse, and very skilled team involved in making those choices and changes. We've come up with what I think is a good compromise between all the various competing interests.

Wait, what do you mean? Official rules that come out in september?

Yes, finalized events and rules are published digitally in September.

According to soinc.org the rules come out 9/4

[meierfra]

@Chalker
As someone who runs a tournament, I would really like it if Protein Modeling, Experimental Design, WIDI, and Forensics were all in the morning. Is this something you consider when making up the schedule? Can I ask that 2 of those be in the same block or one of them be self-scheduled? Thanks.

[Unome]

@Chalker
As someone who runs a tournament, I would really like it if Protein Modeling, Experimental Design, WIDI, and Forensics were all in the morning. Is this something you consider when making up the schedule? Can I ask that 2 of those be in the same block or one of them be self-scheduled? Thanks.

Does the national schedule have that much influence over schedules in your area?

(also, as I understand it the national schedule is primarily developed by the tournament directors, with minimal input from NSO)

[meierfra]

@Chalker
As someone who runs a tournament, I would really like it if Protein Modeling, Experimental Design, WIDI, and Forensics were all in the morning. Is this something you consider when making up the schedule? Can I ask that 2 of those be in the same block or one of them be self-scheduled? Thanks.

Does the national schedule have that much influence over schedules in your area?

(also, as I understand it the national schedule is primarily developed by the tournament directors, with minimal input from NSO)

The state of Michigan, and most of the states around here, follow the national schedule for the state tournament. Almost all of the regionals, except for a couple of the really small ones, follow the state schedule. So we, as invitationals, also follow the national schedule. I've seen that you do the Chattahoochee invite with more than half self-scheduling. Teams expect an invitational to be run to help them prepare for their real competition, and want to see the same conflicts that they'll see then.

But I didn't realize that it isn't NSO who makes up the national schedule.

[Unome]

@Chalker
As someone who runs a tournament, I would really like it if Protein Modeling, Experimental Design, WIDI, and Forensics were all in the morning. Is this something you consider when making up the schedule? Can I ask that 2 of those be in the same block or one of them be self-scheduled? Thanks.

Does the national schedule have that much influence over schedules in your area?

(also, as I understand it the national schedule is primarily developed by the tournament directors, with minimal input from NSO)

The state of Michigan, and most of the states around here, follow the national schedule for the state tournament. Almost all of the regionals, except for a couple of the really small ones, follow the state schedule. So we, as invitationals, also follow the national schedule. I've seen that you do the Chattahoochee invite with more than half self-scheduling. Teams expect an invitational to be run to help them prepare for their real competition, and want to see the same conflicts that they'll see then.

But I didn't realize that it isn't NSO who makes up the national schedule.

Ok, I thought it might be something like that - I haven't looked at Michigan much, since John is here to cover those for the wiki. The prevalence of self-scheduling in Georgia is definitely a part of why Chattahoochee runs full self-scheduled.

[nicholasmaurer]

@Chalker
As someone who runs a tournament, I would really like it if Protein Modeling, Experimental Design, WIDI, and Forensics were all in the morning. Is this something you consider when making up the schedule? Can I ask that 2 of those be in the same block or one of them be self-scheduled? Thanks.

I don't think this request is possible. Typically, except for 1-2 events (e.g. Disease Detectives) which run only during the impound period, all events are run during all six of the main time slots. Therefore, there are not "morning" vs. "afternoon" events. For any given team, it is certainly possible that all of these events would be in the morning. But that would likely mean another team has all four events in the afternoon.

I also wouldn't expect any of those events to be self-schedule; none have been in the past.

As a Tournament Director, however, you are certainly empowered to set your own tournament's schedule to make your requests happen. But I would not expect the National Tournament schedule to reflect any of these requests.

[pikachu4919]

@Chalker
As someone who runs a tournament, I would really like it if Protein Modeling, Experimental Design, WIDI, and Forensics were all in the morning. Is this something you consider when making up the schedule? Can I ask that 2 of those be in the same block or one of them be self-scheduled? Thanks.

I don't think this request is possible. Typically, except for 1-2 events (e.g. Disease Detectives) which run only during the impound period, all events are run during all six of the main time slots. Therefore, there are not "morning" vs. "afternoon" events. For any given team, it is certainly possible that all of these events would be in the morning. But that would likely mean another team has all four events in the afternoon.

I also wouldn't expect any of those events to be self-schedule; none have been in the past.

As a Tournament Director, however, you are certainly empowered to set your own tournament's schedule to make your requests happen. But I would not expect the National Tournament schedule to reflect any of these requests.

As someone who has also worked as a tournament exec, I agree with this. A lot of people complain about stuff that’s hard to grade not always being in the morning, but at the same time, for some things you can only run a certain amount of teams at a time. For example, for lab events like Forensics, fire safety rules only allow a restricted number of people in the lab at a time - you get all the teams to go by splitting them across the timeslots like how nats does, and in that way, it isn’t really possible to have everyone do it in the morning. The same applies to Protein - you can only have so many people in a computer lab at once. The events like Disease Detectives that run all teams in the morning are able to do that since the way it’s run enables it to be done with everyone in the same room at once.

All in all, a lot of the time the reason why these events are run the way they are in terms of time slots is because of the number of teams attending and limitations on how many of those teams a given space can hold at a time.

While this doesn’t necessarily fully answer the question of opening everything up to self signup, it also applies since like Nick said, for every team that signs up for a morning slot, that’s another team signing up for an afternoon slot. Not everyone is going to be happy.

[meierfra]

@Chalker
As someone who runs a tournament, I would really like it if Protein Modeling, Experimental Design, WIDI, and Forensics were all in the morning. Is this something you consider when making up the schedule? Can I ask that 2 of those be in the same block or one of them be self-scheduled? Thanks.

I don't think this request is possible. Typically, except for 1-2 events (e.g. Disease Detectives) which run only during the impound period, all events are run during all six of the main time slots. Therefore, there are not "morning" vs. "afternoon" events. For any given team, it is certainly possible that all of these events would be in the morning. But that would likely mean another team has all four events in the afternoon.

I also wouldn't expect any of those events to be self-schedule; none have been in the past.

As a Tournament Director, however, you are certainly empowered to set your own tournament's schedule to make your requests happen. But I would not expect the National Tournament schedule to reflect any of these requests.

I apologize; I did use some shorthand that I thought was clear. My cap is 36 teams and so I run each event in 3 blocks with 12 teams each. There aren't many very large invites around here and most of the invites here run a similar schedule. Then I run 3 blocks in the morning and 3 blocks in the afternoon, giving me that total of 6 blocks.

So I would like all of the worst grading events to fit into 3 blocks, that I can schedule into the morning. If there are 4 events that I want in 3 blocks, then on the national schedule, I either need 2 of them to be in the same block or one of them to be self-scheduled.

ExpDes was self-scheduled a couple of years ago; though I wouldn't expect it to be again so soon.

[Unome]

@Chalker
As someone who runs a tournament, I would really like it if Protein Modeling, Experimental Design, WIDI, and Forensics were all in the morning. Is this something you consider when making up the schedule? Can I ask that 2 of those be in the same block or one of them be self-scheduled? Thanks.

I don't think this request is possible. Typically, except for 1-2 events (e.g. Disease Detectives) which run only during the impound period, all events are run during all six of the main time slots. Therefore, there are not "morning" vs. "afternoon" events. For any given team, it is certainly possible that all of these events would be in the morning. But that would likely mean another team has all four events in the afternoon.

I also wouldn't expect any of those events to be self-schedule; none have been in the past.

As a Tournament Director, however, you are certainly empowered to set your own tournament's schedule to make your requests happen. But I would not expect the National Tournament schedule to reflect any of these requests.

I apologize; I did use some shorthand that I thought was clear. My cap is 36 teams and so I run each event in 3 blocks with 12 teams each. There aren't many very large invites around here and most of the invites here run a similar schedule. Then I run 3 blocks in the morning and 3 blocks in the afternoon, giving me that total of 6 blocks.

So I would like all of the worst grading events to fit into 3 blocks, that I can schedule into the morning. If there are 4 events that I want in 3 blocks, then on the national schedule, I either need 2 of them to be in the same block or one of them to be self-scheduled.

ExpDes was self-scheduled a couple of years ago; though I wouldn't expect it to be again so soon.

I wouldn't give ExpDes that low a chance of being self-scheduled again. The only major limitation for Nationals is having a room big enough, which I suspect isn't all that hard for most sites (considering they regularly use large rooms for events that definitely don't need all the space).