The Vision (fans of DI all working together)

• Decentralize data entry.
  • Increase accuracy because people are entering their own information: no more bouncing emails.
  • Give responsibility and authority to stakeholders: the team name will be spelled correctly.
  • Avoid asking one volunteer to enter all the data: don't burn out the super-volunteers.
• Track appraiser training.
  • Team solutions improve from Regionals to State Finals: match that with appraiser team improvement.
  • Aid the State Challenge Masters to form their teams: get them appraiser lists earlier.
  • CMs have observed untrained appraisers are more likely to negatively impact California's selection of its Global Finals representatives: give them the tools to recognize and refuse "warm body" appraisers.

The Reality (Not-fans and stuff hitting the fans)

• Inconsistent participation (as of March 20, 2008)
  • Over 1000 new web site users this season: 700 of these registered to confirm an adult role.
  • 232 of last years 600 users confirmed an adult role this year.
  • Almost 900 people were invited who have not confirmed -- I do not know how many of these are site users from either year.
  • Only 60% of state-bound teams have identified their TM, Appraiser, and Volunteer, many are well past "late".
  • A handful of volunteers suggested they would rather quit than do more than say "yes".
• Missing training data
  • 240+ of the 700+ appraisers listed state-wide are missing training records, and there are even more appraisers not registered.
  • Difficulty in matching appraisers to their training (194 state appraisers, except 7 obvious duplicates, and 95 with no training recorded)

Background

I've scheduled tournaments and coordinated appraisers at both the regional and state levels. When I started in our region, I would get one and a half pieces of paper: one for the team registration, half for the appraiser (the other half sheet for the volunteer went to the volunteer coordinator). From the appraiser paperwork I had one week to contact that appraiser and make sure they knew where training would be held, and later track their appraiser assignment. From the team registration paperwork, I would create a schedule and sticky labels to go on all the packets and score sheets for each team.

My home region is the Silicon Valley Region.  I kept this information on a spreadsheet. In earlier years I informed appraisers via a mass mailing. Lately, it has been via email. The number of people without an email address has dwindled, and this year there was no appraiser that did not have one. I both hope and don't believe that by asking for an email address, we have filtered out otherwise-willing volunteers.

In the early 2000s, I would visit with the Affiliate Directors and they would crank up the old PC and show me their efforts from the 1990s to put everyone in a database. From that database they generated mailing labels and published a statewide newsletter to inform the membership of the years plans, but as costs went up, revenues went down, and web access became commonplace, they instead focused on distributing information via the state web site, californiacreativity.org. Still, that effort was for publication, not for interaction.  In recent years, I have tried to make California Creativity's web presence unified and currrent, with shared responsibility for updates.  I have had mixed success.  Gone are the web sites telling you of upcoming events that happened two seasons ago, and we have several "frequent contributors", but I'm still personally posting a lot of content.

On-line Registration

Recall that two years ago, dionline was used as a national team registration system.  It was a good year.  When it was announced that the system would only be used for global finals for the 06-07 season, Silicon Valley decided to quickly "roll its own", and keep registration on line.  We added appraiser and volunteer registration, and successfully used it for last year's tournament.  This year, we lobbied to take it statewide.  Again this year, it worked well in Silicon Valley.

2008 State Finals

As I write this, State Finals is two weeks away.  The "stuffing party" for all the team envelopes is this weekend.  It's time to be done.  We are not.  Moreover, because we have ceeded control of the data, we don't know when we *will* be done.  That's why I need to lock down the web site Saturday afternoon and start handling exceptions manually.  It's unclear which appraisers that have signed up over the course of the year are really coming and what they're trained in, so I'll start the process by asking for clarification from them, first.

Next Year

I've learned a lot! The design of the interface for the state web site has evolved. I am using an open-source "Content Management System" (CMS) to run the state web site. I use code written by other people and can see how they did it. The core registration process works the way it does is because it was quickly built using available components to replace dionline, and I didn't have any better vision how it should work.  I've got some ideas for the future.  Perhaps you do, too?  That's why I encourage you to post comments.  You still won't see them right after you post them, but I'll only filter the spam.