Like I said, I have some theories about this. Obviously I'm not an NAQT insider so I can't vouch for what goes on behind the scenes, but I'm going to try and draw some conclusions from my impressions of NAQT's interactions with the circuit.bt_green_warbler wrote:I for one would be very interested in reading this.grapesmoker wrote:This is obviously a structural thing but it's connected to question quality in a direct way. NAQT has the logistical capability to run a 192-team tournament but it hasn't done too good a job at getting people to actually produce stuff. I have some theories about why that is that I'd be happy to talk about in another post.
First, I think NAQT has done a really good job in the last few years of opening up to the circuit and they should be commended for that. Having someone like Jeff serve as ombudsman to the community is a really good idea and has gone a long way towards improving various aspects of NAQT's products. So I just want to make it clear that this is intended as a constructive criticism that takes those aforementioned steps as moves in the correct direction and something to build off.
With that in mind, I think there are some things NAQT does really well and other things that it does quite poorly. The things NAQT does well include managing tournaments; virtually every ICT I've attended has been much better organized, taking size into account, than equivalent tournaments. HSNCT is in particular a logistical marvel, so all hats off to NAQT for figuring that system out and making it happen. On the other hand, the thing that NAQT does poorly is recruiting writers. Every year a call goes out to people on the circuit to join, but as far as I can tell, most people end up contributing very little. Especially when it comes to SCT, there is virtually no contribution from community members. Last year was a pleasant aberration in this regard, in that NAQT figured out a way to allow Seth to edit the tournament without compromising his ability to play ICT. That was a great move, but it didn't seem to get followed up. I haven't heard of any outreach on NAQT's part to invite other players to commit themselves early in the year to helping out with this year's SCT, so of course that fell by the wayside. It just didn't turn out to be a priority for most players. I think there are several reasons for this:
1) Like I said, the outreach was minimal. It was mostly just an invitation to write for NAQT. What I think ought to have happened was that NAQT ought to have approached several good writers and invited them to do the same thing that Seth did last year. This should have happened really early, perhaps even as early as after all the Nationals were over. Those writers should have been invited to assemble a team they trusted and enjoyed working with and put to work way ahead of time.
2) NAQT's system invites a diffusion of responsibility. Someone might contribute a few questions here and there, but for the most part, even players who are signed up to write don't seem to be particularly interested in contributing a lot. What ends up happening is that 80% of the tournament is produced by like 5 or 6 people. There is no sense that you as a writer are personally responsible in any way for the success or failure of any particular tournament.
Contrast this with the way ACF recruits people. We don't really do a good job of managing logistics, but what we do well is coordinate amongst ourselves and talk to promising writers on the circuit who are not part of ACF. There's a system in place which takes good writers and brings them up through the ranks by having them work under more experienced editors on something like ACF Fall, then perhaps Winter or Regionals. The teams are typically large enough to get the work done but small enough so that no one can shirk their responsibility. People are held accountable internally and externally for their commitments and are judged on the quality of their contributions. There is a sense that each editor is invested in the success of the tournament and pretty strong social incentives to do it right. As a consequence, I think we do a far better job of recognizing good writers and putting them to work on the right projects. I'm not going to claim that the system is perfect, but I think it's a structural improvement on the model that NAQT uses. In particular, I think the real strength of our system is that we recruit people early on and get them to commit to playing a certain role on an editing team. This locks down the editing teams early on and ensures that there's no ambiguity regarding the makeup of any team for any tournament.
My recommendation to NAQT would be to copy this model. I think a model where you just hope questions will come in and then you have to have non-circuit writers write most of your tournament when they don't is a bad model. I suggest that for next year, NAQT coordinate with ACF to find out who will be editing what and then invite good writers who aren't working on ACF tournaments to work on SCT. Those writers would essentially start sometime during the summer and be responsible for the overwhelming majority of the set. I think a system that works this way would be much better than the current setup with separate subject editors for everything. There should be a head editor who can be aggressive in sending back questions that suck, but hopefully that won't be necessary too often, as that head editor should also have the freedom to pick his or her writing team. I think this model can work really well and would go a long way towards getting circuit people actively writing for NAQT, at least for the SCT. There's no reason that 5 or 6 good writers, working over the course of a couple months (or more if you recruit them in the summer) can't produce a high-quality SCT with time to spare.