Judging Assist

[jay7]

Greetings Modified,

As inspired by the "Automated" judging discussion, vs "Purely Human" judging discussion, I thought that maybe there is a middle ground where we get many of the benefits of automation, as well as benefits from the human flair.

To start off, most of the "automated" type solution ideas I can think of, are subject to a major flaw when combined with human analysis... Namely "They are not real time". Then I thought of something like a human helper.

To make a realistic example:

Circle Contest, Density:
An "add counter" and "trick counter", are tasks which are straight forward, and could provide benefit. Theoretically a judge could type in add numbers in real time, and then at the end of density a score for each player could show their ratio, and number of contacts. This could help align a judge with useful information.

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That being said, I think in the past routines and possibly other competitions had "judging helpers". I was wondering, why did we do away with this? Was it as simple as the fact that we switched from a formula based judging system and just never thought to include them? Or was there a more deep rooted idea?

I think for circle variety, or the technical aspect of a routine for example, having helpers could assist in reducing error... Especially with routines, after seeing 8 routines in a row it can be easy to mentally blur the finer points of the very first routine.

Questions:

1.) Does anyone know why we threw out "helpers"?
2.) Do you think the idea has merit?
3.) Do you think the idea is feasible?

Thanks

[boyle]

Am I right in saying there is generally still an add counter? I think helpers can work, but there needs to be enough people to do the helping in the first place.

[C-Fan]

Yeah, I got the impression from my past few tournaments that there aren't lots of people available/willing to help. In some cases you have a tournament with 7 people, and 5 are competing...and in other cases you have more people but nobody is asking for their help. Then there's the problem of having people willing to help, but not at the level needed. I still remember tournies where the drop counter got it wrong, and that's basically the easiest job in the world.

[janis]

At one point I was interested in creating an ELO type of rating for footbag moves and links but I didn't think there was enough interest from the community to actually go to the effort of implementing it. Is this something that people are thinking about again? I think that going way beyond simple ADD counting is possible if you are using software to help.