Maintaining packet confidentiality?

[Lily]

Apologies if this is not the right place to post this, but, if a tournament digitally distributes packets to rooms, how is confidentiality maintained? Is there a system for this?

[Golran]

In what sense are you talking about? For within your tournament to ensure nobody reads the wrong packet, there are 2 commonly used options:

• Password protect the packets and send out the password for the next round to each of your moderators with their scoresheets or some other way. Adobe and Word both have ways to encrypt PDFs and Docs respectively.
• Send out the next packet by e-mail to start each round

Both of these will ensure that within your tournament, no players will get questions in advance from their moderators (unless the person they're getting the questions from is the one sending it out or that did the encryption, but that's a whole other ethical issue that you're not going to be able to stop once you've chosen who's in charge of questions)

As far as maintaining security across events, it's really a matter of trust that none of the moderators (or teams should your choose to distribute packets) in possession of the packets will give them away to anybody playing the tournament at a later date. The same issue exists for paper packets as it does for electronic packets.