Prequel question (inserted on edit, inspired by the longer ICT thread):
What elements of protest resolution would you say absolutely must be covered in the pre-tournament moderator meeting? Here we're trying to achieve the right balance between good preparation and information overload; we want to be thorough but we don't want teams waiting around half an hour before Round 1 because staff isn't out of their meeting yet.
Jeff Hoppes relayed this statement by e-mail (I didn't immediately catch whether it was a post or a chat) to ICT planners, and a couple of us immediately (to our consternation) realized that, although this statement is false, one could easily get that impression from outside.Evan Nagler wrote: There's an increasing sense among people I've talked to that protests are just denied as a matter of keeping things running on time rather than on merit.
To what extent you all agree with the statements below? Assume we're talking about ICT, though most of this also applies to HSNCT. None of these have been vetted by other NAQTers, and please note that a couple of these are infeasible (or just very bad ideas IMO), but all are natural brainstorms. I'm interested in which of these get resounding agreement (or even resounding condemnation of doing things any other way) as opposed to benign apathy (EDIT) or resounding disagreement.
1. Before any national championship, NAQT should form (from some subset of the members/editors at the tournament) a "protest committee"
1a. ...and tell teams in advance who those people are
2. Any time a protest would determine who wins a game (after any conditional or hypothetical play is carried out, of course), someone in the control room should hear from the protesting team a concise explanation of its exact point(s) of contention.
2a. ...and hear from the other team a concise rebuttal, if the other team so wishes.
3. Every protest resolution should involve a reasonably senior NAQT member concisely explaining the ruling, and in brief the procedure of coming to that conclusion, to both teams.
4. There should be a dedicated resource to carrying out all necessary factual research; that person would have no other duties (i.e. not a reader, scorekeeper, stat person, or control room head)
4a. That person should be on-site.
5. Sometimes it's just not possible to make a quick determination. Wherever the schedule doesn't depend on the outcome of that game (ICT-specific example: as of round 9 the opponents are set through round 14, but a round 7 game would likely affect the necessity of round 8 tiebreaks and the round 9 onward pairings), NAQT should tell both teams that no immediate resolution is available and give them an ETA for the resolution.
5a. Sometimes (i.e. more frequently than current practice), if it's just not possible to make a quick determination, a tossup or bonus should simply be replaced (even if it's reasonable to believe that some amount of research would lead to a resolution in whose correctness we're fairly confident).
6. Correct protest resolution is so important that at an ICT, somebody of the caliber of R. or Andrew should be in a control room instead of reading.
What other statements should be here?
Thanks,
Matt
P.S. If you find it relevant: This year's ICT room layout and scoresheet/packet procedures left me with a de facto control room, the implications of which I didn't ponder in depth beforehand. (Every protest that moderators brought to my attention, I called upstairs.) Otherwise I'm heavily involved in tournament planning but not nearly as well qualified to address factual issues as R., Andrew, Jeff, Matt K., et al. For HSNCT I've typically run a Saturday control room (but relied heavily on R. for protest handling) and handled the Sunday playoff control room. In past years, HSNCT playoff protests have basically paused the tournament while we do everything in our power to get the right resolution quickly.