As many of you will have noticed, the organisation of the competitions has decreased in recent months resulting in less enthusiasm and growth in the competitions, as well as things like taking months to have them judged.
This is due to my life getting busier, being in my hardest year of uni, having increased commitments to church, heading towards getting married in the next year or so, trying to get good at footbag. All these things are taking more and more time and i'm finding I don't have the endless hours I once poured into the competitions.
I'm not entirely sure what to do with the competitions at the moment, it's not as simple as 'handing them off to someone else', because even if there was someone who really wanted to run them, that would potentially undo all the progress that has been made in running them.
I have tried handing bits of the work off to some very helpfull volunteers, but often that takes more time than doing it myself would and normally the jobs don't get done as well. It's a difficult situation I find myself in.
Abondoning the online competitions would be the last and most cowardly option, and this would essentially send online competitions back to square 0 and whoever is ambitious enough to take them on next would have to completely start over. So as far as i'm concerned this is not an option.
Anyway...
I will be leaving the next competitions till end of august. I just need to take a step back and evaluate the whole process and try to make it work.
State of the online competitoins.
wat up guyz,
I'm new to the online comps, in fact the next one will be my second. If you can tell my first was an ATW. Not because it's the trick I was super good at but not others, no because it was the only one I knew how to hit, period. Now I can hit mirages, osis, legover, pickup, i'm trying to hit pixe-mirage and pixie-butterfly, yeah and course butterfly, pixe switch, still trying illusion, heck I even tried barfly a couple of times, doulbe atw, and whirl. Thats just in since march! Also helping big time was the 2006 East Coast Footbag Comp in June (thanks yall for the help). But the online comps have driven me to practice more, hit more, learn more, record and delete more (ha ha). I havn't hit pixie-mirage or p-butterfly, but I'm going to submit one for novice sick one, yall can count on it. So I think that with the way this wonderful comp helps motivate me, and others I'm sure, we need to keep them at whatever cost. Besides in most business transfers there is a change thats made, no doubt about it, big or small. If you transfer your editing and judging responsiblities but not your overseer rights, then you'll still have a say in what floats and what sinks. You could have your personnal time spent reduced to almost nothing, but still be in control. Control-humm the word makes me think... perhaps I'm talking of quality control. Make standards of editing, run a poll (if you havn't) and see what editing style everyone likes most. Then make that your standard. That..having one style..will reduce your time spent. Of course you have formats already, just send all the templates (ie. e-mail, or cd in the mail, etc) to each editor, give a suspense date, when they come back review, they should all be up to snuff if they're all made the same. Then of course if there's problems, then they can be addressed all at the same time (the suspense date, which you pick your best free day for). Now you should have time. Also the editors should know what they're getting into, and if they can't make the suspense date then they should contact you long before then and just send the videos to another editor. All gravy man. I know you've done most of this already. But if you hand it off completely, give it up with written (in detail) standards of operation. Have the new master editing chief conform to the current standards if only for a month or two. I'd also suggest running the comp video submissions more than just one month at a time. Give people the advertising for may, june, july all at the same time. May would be priority but then the editors have june and july videos coming in allready. I little work here, a little work there and editing in small parts instead of just one big session being swamped with work. That would also cut time spent for you and the editors, you could have july's vidoes ready to go in may or june, then just add the new video's as they arrive. Same stuff you do now just with more time to do it. Anyways I talk to much.
Just think about dude, but don't stop the comps!! heck i'd almost do it, but I don't know how to edit video's. But my wife don't work, hummm, maybe. We'll see.
sry for mispells
I'm new to the online comps, in fact the next one will be my second. If you can tell my first was an ATW. Not because it's the trick I was super good at but not others, no because it was the only one I knew how to hit, period. Now I can hit mirages, osis, legover, pickup, i'm trying to hit pixe-mirage and pixie-butterfly, yeah and course butterfly, pixe switch, still trying illusion, heck I even tried barfly a couple of times, doulbe atw, and whirl. Thats just in since march! Also helping big time was the 2006 East Coast Footbag Comp in June (thanks yall for the help). But the online comps have driven me to practice more, hit more, learn more, record and delete more (ha ha). I havn't hit pixie-mirage or p-butterfly, but I'm going to submit one for novice sick one, yall can count on it. So I think that with the way this wonderful comp helps motivate me, and others I'm sure, we need to keep them at whatever cost. Besides in most business transfers there is a change thats made, no doubt about it, big or small. If you transfer your editing and judging responsiblities but not your overseer rights, then you'll still have a say in what floats and what sinks. You could have your personnal time spent reduced to almost nothing, but still be in control. Control-humm the word makes me think... perhaps I'm talking of quality control. Make standards of editing, run a poll (if you havn't) and see what editing style everyone likes most. Then make that your standard. That..having one style..will reduce your time spent. Of course you have formats already, just send all the templates (ie. e-mail, or cd in the mail, etc) to each editor, give a suspense date, when they come back review, they should all be up to snuff if they're all made the same. Then of course if there's problems, then they can be addressed all at the same time (the suspense date, which you pick your best free day for). Now you should have time. Also the editors should know what they're getting into, and if they can't make the suspense date then they should contact you long before then and just send the videos to another editor. All gravy man. I know you've done most of this already. But if you hand it off completely, give it up with written (in detail) standards of operation. Have the new master editing chief conform to the current standards if only for a month or two. I'd also suggest running the comp video submissions more than just one month at a time. Give people the advertising for may, june, july all at the same time. May would be priority but then the editors have june and july videos coming in allready. I little work here, a little work there and editing in small parts instead of just one big session being swamped with work. That would also cut time spent for you and the editors, you could have july's vidoes ready to go in may or june, then just add the new video's as they arrive. Same stuff you do now just with more time to do it. Anyways I talk to much.
Just think about dude, but don't stop the comps!! heck i'd almost do it, but I don't know how to edit video's. But my wife don't work, hummm, maybe. We'll see.
sry for mispells
<--==╡"F♂OtYmÄtT"╞==-->
To bend and move is natural; to play footbag is naturaler!! Ha Ha
-Matt Hennemuth
Footy Footbags Club
To bend and move is natural; to play footbag is naturaler!! Ha Ha
-Matt Hennemuth
Footy Footbags Club
Thanks matt, you said some very valuable things there .
Breakdown of the time taken for online competitons:
Advertising - I don't do this ANYWHERE NEAR aswell as it could be done, uploading videos on youtube, using the modified banner to advertise, making advertisement threads in footbag.org and other forums in modified... this list goes on!
Currently I probably spend about 3-4 hours each competition in advertising pre and post competition release.
Editing - I think if I work efficiently and I have all the footage pre-organised (sitting in a folder with filenames in format:
"Player Name(Country)Move(s) Hit.wmv"
AND I don't have too many hicups with video formats (which I always do), then I can get each come edited and exported and uploaded in 3 hours each, which isn't so bad for the editing part.
This efficiency comes from prior organisation, I already have the titles ready (just need to edit them) I already have the overlay and the intros ready, and most importantly I spend time during the month downloading the entrys from my email, renaming them to the above format and making sure they are playable video files (you would have no idea how many people send me files that are impossible to play or convert in any application).
So this means ongoing time during the month, and it has to be done during the month or else I end up missing peoples entrys (like last comp), and I don't have time to reply saying "your video doesn't work, please resubmit it".
So this might take 5 mins per entry, I get around 60 entrys per month, so that's another 5 hours of preparation each competition.
If I add that all together I get 17 hours of work just to put the competitions out, this is not including several hours hitting my own entrys (can't expect people to enter my competition if I can't be bothered entering myself!).
Then there is the post-release procedures... aka judging.
Judging - If I use the voting system we used to have then everyone has to take the time to rank all the players, so it takes an hour or 2 of their time, then I spent at least 10 hours either adding up the results or fiddling round with my database trying to get it to give me correct results - this is very accurate but highly inconsistant.
Using a thread poll - this take me no time at all, and everyone only has to click twice to choose who they think is best - unfortunatly only the top 2 or 3 players get voted for and everyone else is last equal - the lease accurate voting system.
Finally there is the new system, using judges. This means I spent 2-4 hours finding appropriate judges and then telling them how the competitions should be judged (like they listen or i'm even close to right anyway), and then I spend a further 2-3 hours assessing their votes and making a final decision - very stressful. - This solution gives pretty accurate results but is still time consuming.
So there is what goes on basicly in the running of the competitions.
To be honest I don't mind editing them that much, and without some kind of funding to pay people I can't see it getting any easier by asking others to edit for me, and so far the quality has never been as good, and the days taken between entrys closed and release has never been as fast as when I do it myself.
The part that I really suck at is judging.
But I think I have a solution:
I write up a 'set of judging guidelines' on basicly how online sick3 should be judged, then I hand the entire judging area off to someone else who wants experiance in judging sick competitions and give them the 'set of guidelines'. My volunteer takes care of everything else, I don't have to stress out and judge the competitions 2 months after the are released AND nobody has to deal with my extreamly biased judging (lol we all know it's true).
WHEW! Well i'm glad i've given myself 2 months to get this whole thing sorted because I will have to chip away at it slowly, but I can see the online competitoins being restored to their former glory!
.Breakdown of the time taken for online competitons:
Advertising - I don't do this ANYWHERE NEAR aswell as it could be done, uploading videos on youtube, using the modified banner to advertise, making advertisement threads in footbag.org and other forums in modified... this list goes on!
Currently I probably spend about 3-4 hours each competition in advertising pre and post competition release.
Editing - I think if I work efficiently and I have all the footage pre-organised (sitting in a folder with filenames in format:
"Player Name(Country)Move(s) Hit.wmv"
AND I don't have too many hicups with video formats (which I always do), then I can get each come edited and exported and uploaded in 3 hours each, which isn't so bad for the editing part.
This efficiency comes from prior organisation, I already have the titles ready (just need to edit them) I already have the overlay and the intros ready, and most importantly I spend time during the month downloading the entrys from my email, renaming them to the above format and making sure they are playable video files (you would have no idea how many people send me files that are impossible to play or convert in any application).
So this means ongoing time during the month, and it has to be done during the month or else I end up missing peoples entrys (like last comp), and I don't have time to reply saying "your video doesn't work, please resubmit it".
So this might take 5 mins per entry, I get around 60 entrys per month, so that's another 5 hours of preparation each competition.
If I add that all together I get 17 hours of work just to put the competitions out, this is not including several hours hitting my own entrys (can't expect people to enter my competition if I can't be bothered entering myself!).
Then there is the post-release procedures... aka judging.
Judging - If I use the voting system we used to have then everyone has to take the time to rank all the players, so it takes an hour or 2 of their time, then I spent at least 10 hours either adding up the results or fiddling round with my database trying to get it to give me correct results - this is very accurate but highly inconsistant.
Using a thread poll - this take me no time at all, and everyone only has to click twice to choose who they think is best - unfortunatly only the top 2 or 3 players get voted for and everyone else is last equal - the lease accurate voting system.
Finally there is the new system, using judges. This means I spent 2-4 hours finding appropriate judges and then telling them how the competitions should be judged (like they listen or i'm even close to right anyway), and then I spend a further 2-3 hours assessing their votes and making a final decision - very stressful. - This solution gives pretty accurate results but is still time consuming.
So there is what goes on basicly in the running of the competitions.
To be honest I don't mind editing them that much, and without some kind of funding to pay people I can't see it getting any easier by asking others to edit for me, and so far the quality has never been as good, and the days taken between entrys closed and release has never been as fast as when I do it myself.
The part that I really suck at is judging.
But I think I have a solution:
I write up a 'set of judging guidelines' on basicly how online sick3 should be judged, then I hand the entire judging area off to someone else who wants experiance in judging sick competitions and give them the 'set of guidelines'. My volunteer takes care of everything else, I don't have to stress out and judge the competitions 2 months after the are released AND nobody has to deal with my extreamly biased judging (lol we all know it's true).
WHEW! Well i'm glad i've given myself 2 months to get this whole thing sorted because I will have to chip away at it slowly, but I can see the online competitoins being restored to their former glory!
Regarding judging - I think a much better idea would be similar to what you suggested but let the person in charge of judging create the guidelines and make sure you have somebody who has experience in judging. If people are unhappy with their performance they can always be sacked and replaced - I just think you need to give them some freedom and also no offence but I was a little sceptical of your guidelines when I judged an event - which I guess comes down to experience. I would probably be happy to take the roll of organising judging although I do like competing occasionally so maybe that would be an issue but pretty soon I will have the time and I think I have the experience.
If you were happy to continue editing then it seems to me that the other duties can be delegated off - all you need is to find people willing to donate time to being in charge of Advertising or Judging - these things won't proclude people from entering its just a matter of finding people who have a few spare hours they can donate.
I agree that whoever you put in charge of judging should create the guidelines.
In order to minimise the amount of time required to "assess the judges votes" the guidlines should include some sort of points system whereby the judges rankings correspond to a certain amount of points which go to make up the final rankings, that way the judges simply submit their rankings and the head judge just tallies the points and posts the final ranking.Judging is something that will rarely please everyone, but as long as the rules are clear from the beginning and as exhaustive as necessary, and the judging sticks to the guidlines in a consistent manner problems and time needed to judge will be minimised.I'd be happy to judge but I'd need to update my media player so I can easily view the vids frame by frame (unless in future they are quicktime friendly). I don't see myself entering so I have no problem there.
I think it will help to have a core group of people commited to judging (At least 3 including the head judge if he does not enter himself) as this will aid consistency - the more you do it, the better you get and the less time you need. I think it'd be best if there were at least three judges not necessarily including the "head judge" who moniters the guidlines and tallies the results, who do not compete, but are capable and willing to judge only. There will always be disagreements, particularly over cleanliness, but I think these will be managable, as they have been up to know. The main thing is to make it easier for Nic to run and keeping a core group of judges will achieve that and will only improve the quality of the comp as well.
I agree that whoever you put in charge of judging should create the guidelines.
In order to minimise the amount of time required to "assess the judges votes" the guidlines should include some sort of points system whereby the judges rankings correspond to a certain amount of points which go to make up the final rankings, that way the judges simply submit their rankings and the head judge just tallies the points and posts the final ranking.Judging is something that will rarely please everyone, but as long as the rules are clear from the beginning and as exhaustive as necessary, and the judging sticks to the guidlines in a consistent manner problems and time needed to judge will be minimised.I'd be happy to judge but I'd need to update my media player so I can easily view the vids frame by frame (unless in future they are quicktime friendly). I don't see myself entering so I have no problem there.
I think it will help to have a core group of people commited to judging (At least 3 including the head judge if he does not enter himself) as this will aid consistency - the more you do it, the better you get and the less time you need. I think it'd be best if there were at least three judges not necessarily including the "head judge" who moniters the guidlines and tallies the results, who do not compete, but are capable and willing to judge only. There will always be disagreements, particularly over cleanliness, but I think these will be managable, as they have been up to know. The main thing is to make it easier for Nic to run and keeping a core group of judges will achieve that and will only improve the quality of the comp as well.
Who wears short shorts?
Dylan Govender.
Dylan Govender.
That is great news, I was really hoping you would reply to this because I agree with most of your ideas about judging and you are in charge of implementing the IFPA sick1 and sick3 rules so I think it would be most usefull to you.Jeremy wrote:Regarding judging - I think a much better idea would be similar to what you suggested but let the person in charge of judging create the guidelines and make sure you have somebody who has experience in judging. If people are unhappy with their performance they can always be sacked and replaced - I just think you need to give them some freedom and also no offence but I was a little sceptical of your guidelines when I judged an event - which I guess comes down to experience. I would probably be happy to take the roll of organising judging although I do like competing occasionally so maybe that would be an issue but pretty soon I will have the time and I think I have the experience.
I will keep in contact with you about it
Competing and judging in the same event is not a problem at all, if you really think you will have problems ranking yourself you can get someone else to judge the events you are in or give their opinion of where you should be ranked.
Cheers Jeremy
Edit: Thanks for your input Dyalan! You always have very valuable things to say, it would be awesome if you could help judge aswell, you both did a great job juding sick3 in Aussie nationals 06!
-
james_dean
- space cowboy
- Posts: 2268
- Joined: 26 Oct 2004 23:11
- Location: Bendigo, Vic, Australia
I would be happy to judge, but I'm not sure how much experience you would be looking for. Also re: competeing and judging. Personally, I think I can rank myself objectively, but others might have a problem with it. This is the only reason I can think of for not doing both, people might get their knickers in a knot. (I know for myself, if I'm tossing up between my move and another for a place I just put the other first)
-
shredzilla
- Post Master General
- Posts: 3260
- Joined: 14 Oct 2005 06:24
- Location: Paradise Lost
- Contact:
Wow, I can't believe I missed this topic. I must be slackin on my fizzied' surfin! And unfortunately, I have nothing to add to the topic! Except to say that I've always loved the comps, and I agree that they are one of the coolest and most rewarding things on modified. And I appreciate all your work Nic, you da man.
I was actually working on a sick trick today! I didn't have much to submit last time because I had camera issues and injury issues. But I'm already started on getting my vids done early this time. I'm stoked for the next one! Keep the comps alive!
I was actually working on a sick trick today! I didn't have much to submit last time because I had camera issues and injury issues. But I'm already started on getting my vids done early this time. I'm stoked for the next one! Keep the comps alive!
J. Chris "Thread-killer" Miller
i just came up with a good and fair way of judging each persons entry....you should judge it on 5 different areas and score each area on a scale of 1-10, creating a total possible score for each competitor of 50 points. The areas that could be judged should be, execution, style, difficulty, creativity, and overall presentation. The judges could give scores for each of these areas and whoever has the highest point total would win.
I know that this method would not work perfectly but its just an idea that i think may be beneficial to the online competitions.
I know that this method would not work perfectly but its just an idea that i think may be beneficial to the online competitions.
Troy Erstling 
-
shredzilla
- Post Master General
- Posts: 3260
- Joined: 14 Oct 2005 06:24
- Location: Paradise Lost
- Contact:
Isn't that pretty much how things are done already? Except then you rank the scores at the end...shredzilla wrote:Yeah, I think that's how they should judge routines. You should get a score, almost right away after your routine. Just like in other solo performance sports such as skateboarding, ballet, and most olympic sports. I envision it going that way eventually.
You can send them in now if you like - just send it in an email attached to footbagonline@gmail.com!Isilwar wrote:When can we start sending in videos for the next Online Competition? I think I'll enter in the next one...