Adventures in Tabroom.com: MJP deadlines

1/15/2015

MJP deadlines

This is probably worth passing along.

If you use MJP at your tournament, you will want to set it up so that teams can’t pref unless their judges are all in place. That’s easy enough. You’ll also want everyone’s teams to stay in place. That's not so easy, especially if you have, shall we say, inevitably disorganized loosey-goosey teams attending your tournament (and you probably do). There is only one thing more annoying than getting judge changes once MJP opens and having to tell everyone to go back and redo their prefs, and that's actually being the everyone constantly going in and redoing their prefs. That vague "everyone" isn't blaming the loose geese (leese geese? loose gooses) for the extra work: they're blaming you.

So, a piece of advice. Open prefs late. If the tournament starts on Friday afternoon, open them Thursday night. This reduces the likelihood of last minute changes. Of course, you don’t want that list of judges to be a surprise 24 hours before the tournament, so make sure that you have the list of judges public at least a week before the tournament starts.

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Tournament Tool Kit

In addition to the tabroom.com manual, there's other things people about to throw a tournament might be interested in.

Setting up registration at a tournament: The difference between a smooth registration process and a traffic jam is knowing how tabroom.com works, and how to use it to move people quickly out of the world and into your events. This pdf works regardless of whether you're actually tabbing on tabroom.

E-Ballot instructions. Using e-ballots and want to make sure your judges are plugged into tabroom.com? First, here are the instructions from one tournament, in a docx file. Edit it with your own wifi specs, and claim it as your own: Word file for editing Or, take this general PDF and distribute it without your own specific site instructions.

A definitive approach to tournament conflicts, for teams and for judges I recommend that you distribute these before every tournament.

How to judge A collection of how-to materials for judging both speech and debate. Print up some of the relevant ones for your tournaments where you're training a lot of new judges.

Tabbing Best Practices. This is a handy short guide to what should be going on in tab rooms. A more elaborate version, with detailed explanations, also exists here.

Mutual Judge Preferences This explains how MJP works, and urges all teams to use it as the best tool for engineering the activity towards their own preferences. Recomended as part of an invitation to college events where a lot of the attendees may not be familiar with MJP. (This article was also published in Rostrum.)