ACF Survey

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The King's Flight to the Scots
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ACF Survey

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

Hi all,

ACF has a new survey out. If there's anything regarding ACF you'd like us to hear your opinion on, please let us know here - all questions are optional but we'd love to get your input!
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by Jack »

I'm very happy to see that ACF is trying to get feedback, but I would like to humbly suggest this survey be re-released by being emailed to college clubs directly (assuming the club contact list is complete) rather than being just left on a forum post where anyone on the site can give feedback. I think that would make the feedback much more useful, accurate, and representative.

Edit: I missed that email validation is supposed to be required, but it actually doesn't seem to be collected on the form.
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by Auroni »

jacke wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 2:34 am I'm very happy to see that ACF is trying to get feedback, but I would like to humbly suggest this survey be re-released by being emailed to college clubs directly (assuming the club contact list is complete) rather than being just left on a forum post where anyone on the site can give feedback. I think that would make the feedback much more useful, accurate, and representative.

Edit: I missed that email validation is supposed to be required, but it actually doesn't seem to be collected on the form.
Chiming in as the person who put this together: This was done to ensure anonymity and allow staffers, observers, and members of the wider quizbowl community a chance to weigh in. We’ve also shared it across all of our social media platforms and public spaces dedicated to quizbowl discussion. We’ll discuss directly contacting individual clubs, thank you for the suggestion!
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by Jack »

Auroni wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 2:43 am]
Chiming in as the person who put this together: This was done to ensure anonymity and allow staffers, observers, and members of the wider quizbowl community a chance to weigh in. We’ve also shared it across all of our social media platforms and public spaces dedicated to quizbowl discussion. We’ll discuss directly contacting individual clubs, thank you for the suggestion!
Great, thank you! I agree that anonymity is important, and I wasn't expecting that ACF would collect non-anonymous responses. I was just under the false impression that ACF was primarily concerned here with current players and clubs rather than everyone altogether, but evidently this is not the case.
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by TheInventor »

I'm also excited to see that ACF is trying to gather meaningful feedback from the general player base.

That being said, it now seemd to me that ACF doesn't really have a goal for what it wants to be. For a while, it seemed to me that ACF's purpose was to push the boundaries of pyramidal quizbowl by writing more and more innovative questions with more and more content, fostering an environment for the best players to see just how far quizbowl can go. But if that was the case, then there would be no reason for ACF to collect feedback from the general player base.

On the other hand, if ACF wants to become the custodian of college quizbowl as a whole, then I think this survey is a great first step to figuring out how to cater to the general body of college student and grow the game.

Of course, I'm not suggesting these two goals are totally mutually exclusive (to an extent I believe they are in the short term, but not the long term). But If ACF doesn't have a purpose for doing the things it does, then how will it make decisions about what to do? How will it take decisive action and follow through on the things it sets out to accomplish? So in any case, I think ACF as an organization should collectively decide what their purpose is and act decisively and consistently towards that purpose.
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by women, fire and dangerous things »

TheInventor wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 12:12 pm That being said, it now seemd to me that ACF doesn't really have a goal for what it wants to be. For a while, it seemed to me that ACF's purpose was to push the boundaries of pyramidal quizbowl by writing more and more innovative questions with more and more content, fostering an environment for the best players to see just how far quizbowl can go. But if that was the case, then there would be no reason for ACF to collect feedback from the general player base.
Not speaking for ACF, I'd dispute that this was ever the purpose of ACF as an organization, despite the persistent "ACF is impossible" meme. If it was, why would we bother putting Fall on every year?
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by Cheynem »

I would hope ACF would re-publish or re-release this survey after Regionals and/or Nationals, as I assume a lot of the questions might have different or more complete answers following those 2020 tournaments.
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by Jack »

Cheynem wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 1:14 pm I would hope ACF would re-publish or re-release this survey after Regionals and/or Nationals, as I assume a lot of the questions might have different or more complete answers following those 2020 tournaments.
I agree with this.

Also, part of the reason that I suggest sending this survey directly to clubs, like Alex D. did after ACF Fall (which was awesome!), is because many people who currently play ACF tournaments don't actively use the forums (and definitely are not following ACF on social media). In our club at Princeton, only about a third of our active members even have forum accounts, and most of them don't routinely look at the forum. Whereas, if I get emailed a link to a survey with "[QUIZ BOWL]" in the subject line or something, I'm definitely gonna check it and then can easily forward it to everyone. Will everyone do this? Perhaps not, but it's definitely gonna help get more people who aren't as digitally connected to the quiz bowl world to take it. Maybe I'm projecting a bit here, but I would think this is a pretty reasonable characterization of what other clubs look like.

I hope I'm not coming across as accusatory or anything. I just want to make sure ACF tries to capture what I believe to be an underrepresented demographic in 'quiz bowl politics,' if you will -- the humble B and C team players who don't necessarily use the quiz bowl discord, play every tournament, or check the forums on the daily. Capturing these voices is doubly important, in my view, because I feel that the opinions of the college students currently running clubs and attending tournaments should be prioritized when we consider how to grow, modify, and change quiz bowl at the college level. This isn't a slight to people like Mike above, of course. Their feedback is still important. I would just hope that, given feedback on Regionals from, say, a player from Pitt B, and someone no longer playing at the college (non-open) level, ACF would prioritize the feedback of the current player above the latter.
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by Cheynem »

To be clear, I didn't fill out the survey and I don't intend to; I was just making a suggestion. I completely agree with Jack that the proper audience for this survey is current college players/teams.
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

jacke wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 2:08 pm
Also, part of the reason that I suggest sending this survey directly to clubs, like Alex D. did after ACF Fall (which was awesome!), is because many people who currently play ACF tournaments don't actively use the forums (and definitely are not following ACF on social media). In our club at Princeton, only about a third of our active members even have forum accounts, and most of them don't routinely look at the forum. Whereas, if I get emailed a link to a survey with "[QUIZ BOWL]" in the subject line or something, I'm definitely gonna check it and then can easily forward it to everyone. Will everyone do this? Perhaps not, but it's definitely gonna help get more people who aren't as digitally connected to the quiz bowl world to take it. Maybe I'm projecting a bit here, but I would think this is a pretty reasonable characterization of what other clubs look like.
Agreed, we've now shared the survey with the contact list in addition to posting it on the forums and social media.
Cheynem wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 1:14 pm I would hope ACF would re-publish or re-release this survey after Regionals and/or Nationals, as I assume a lot of the questions might have different or more complete answers following those 2020 tournaments.
Yes, we're planning to re-release the survey after ACF Nationals.
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

TheInventor wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 12:12 pm I'm also excited to see that ACF is trying to gather meaningful feedback from the general player base.

That being said, it now seemd to me that ACF doesn't really have a goal for what it wants to be. For a while, it seemed to me that ACF's purpose was to push the boundaries of pyramidal quizbowl by writing more and more innovative questions with more and more content, fostering an environment for the best players to see just how far quizbowl can go. But if that was the case, then there would be no reason for ACF to collect feedback from the general player base.

On the other hand, if ACF wants to become the custodian of college quizbowl as a whole, then I think this survey is a great first step to figuring out how to cater to the general body of college student and grow the game.

Of course, I'm not suggesting these two goals are totally mutually exclusive (to an extent I believe they are in the short term, but not the long term). But If ACF doesn't have a purpose for doing the things it does, then how will it make decisions about what to do? How will it take decisive action and follow through on the things it sets out to accomplish? So in any case, I think ACF as an organization should collectively decide what their purpose is and act decisively and consistently towards that purpose.
Our goal is to support the entire collegiate community on several different fronts, including the production of high-quality tournaments for a range of different audiences and the development of resources for the benefit of collegiate quizbowl at large.
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by TheInventor »

The King's Flight to the Scots wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 4:30 pm Our goal is to support the entire collegiate community on several different fronts, including the production of high-quality tournaments for a range of different audiences and the development of resources for the benefit of collegiate quizbowl at large.
Is this ACF's goal, or your understanding of ACF's goal? Reason I'm asking is Alex Damisch's recent tweet says it's "developing the next generation of quizbowl writers and editors", which sound like two completely different things to me.
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Re: ACF Survey

Post by Auks Ran Ova »

TheInventor wrote: Wed Dec 04, 2019 7:50 pm
The King's Flight to the Scots wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 4:30 pm Our goal is to support the entire collegiate community on several different fronts, including the production of high-quality tournaments for a range of different audiences and the development of resources for the benefit of collegiate quizbowl at large.
Is this ACF's goal, or your understanding of ACF's goal? Reason I'm asking is Alex Damisch's recent tweet says it's "developing the next generation of quizbowl writers and editors", which sound like two completely different things to me.
As to your second sentence, this:
the production of high-quality tournaments
is a pretty integral part of the way ACF (or any organization, really) accomplishes this:
"developing the next generation of quizbowl writers and editors"
As to your first sentence:

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Re: ACF Survey

Post by MorganV »

The King's Flight to the Scots wrote: Tue Dec 03, 2019 4:30 pm several different fronts, including
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