Euros Registration Ideas for Consideration

From Jens Fischer:

This message is sent on behalf of the hosts of Amsterdam Euros. It

contains information on the proposed registration system, and should

serve as the basis for the EUDC Council meeting in Antalya at Koc

Worlds on Dec. 28th over lunch. The information for that meeting was

send out on EUDC, BD and the Facebook group "EUDC Council" moments

ago.

Please do also take a look at the attached files.

All the best,

Jens Fischer

EUDC Council President

_______________________

Dear debaters,

A couple of weeks ago, we informed you that we are thinking about a

new registration system to be used at Euros. In the meantime, we have

received numerous questions and suggestions via personal

communications and our Facebook forum. We’d like to thank everyone who

helped us in this way!

This proposal is the result of these questions. It will be discussed

at Euros Council in Antalya and will only be adopted if you accept it.

To clarify the discussion, we have simulated a registration

procedure, the details of which are also presented below.

a) Why a new system?

Debating is growing, and demand at registration for Worlds and Euros

exceeded the team cap a number of times and will do so again in the

future. A first-registered-first-served system makes registration

dependent on the irrelevant criterion of whether the institution can

type all that is necessary within 90 seconds, which has the added

disadvantages of creating a slight bias against non-native speakers.

Because institutions either get all the teams they apply for or are

placed on a waiting list, the number of represented institutions

becomes more limited with such a system too. All in all, institutions

who were traditionally present at Worlds every year, have had to miss

out entirely because of not registering on time. Institutions that

wanted to attend Euros found out that they were off the waiting list

when it was too late to apply for funding or visa, so they were

therefore unable to attend, or send as many people as they wanted to

send.

b) What are we proposing?

Institutions get 48 hours to register. The exact order in which they

do so is not important. We then distribute the available places by

three criteria.

1) Institutions that have been present at EUDC in the past can get a

guaranteed number of places. To find the number of guaranteed places,

we use the number of teams present at the last 4 EUDCs:

Teams in past 4 years/Guaranteed places

0-3 / 0

4-7 / 1

8-11 / 2

12-15 / 3

16-19 / 4 (unless the institution cap is lower)

20-23 / 5 (unless the institution cap is lower)

This is different from our earlier proposal, which only looked at the

number of times an institution was present in the last 4 editions. If

an institution lacked funding one year but was always present with a

large delegation in other years, they will not be cut in the number of

guaranteed places too much.

Furthermore, under the assumption that the team cap is never much

lower than the average of the last four years, this system can

guarantee that the number of reserved places can never (not even in

theory) be higher than the team cap.

2) We select one institution by lot from every country that did not

get reserved seats through criterion 1.

3)The remaining places are distributed through a lottery. The lottery

does not advantage institutions that requested more teams than they

are planning to send, thus making it unattractive to register more

teams just to have more chances.

More details are in the attached file and this googledoc:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dwb9thm_09fpcw6c6

c) What are the results?

We have simulated a registration procedure to see what the

consequences of our system would be. We simulated a situation of high

overregistration, with 250 teams from 121 institution requesting one

of the total 200 team spots, with an institutional team cap of 4

(which we are not necessarily using at Euros). The simulation is

discussed in great detail in the googledoc (etc) including a list of

all the institutions and how many reserved seats they would get.

Please note that although we hope Amsterdam Euros will be popular, we

don’t except such an excess of registration.

The simulation is attached or can be found in this googledoc:

http://docs.google.com/View?id=dwb9thm_09fpcw6c6. This also contains a

list of the institutions that were present at the past five European

Championships.

The simulation leads us to the following conclusions:

The number of institutions present with our lottery system is higher,

because we do not automatically grant teams that registered slightly

earlier 3 places versus 0 or 1 for those on the waiting list. In the

simulation 110 of the 121 institutions that registered are actually

allowed to send at least one team. We see that 6 institutions send 4

teams, 20 send 3 teams, 32 send 2 teams, 52 send 1 team and

unfortunately and 11 institutions will have to be disappointed. Under

a first-register-first-serve-system, the latter number would probably

be closer to 25 or 30

The n-1 rule delivers slightly fewer judges than in the

first-registered-first-served system, up to 10 judges fewer, on 50

rooms. We believe it is possible for the CA team to undercut this.

The system is thus both fair to institutions that have contributed to

debating in the past decades and creates sufficient opportunities for

newer institutions to be present. It does not alter the judging pool

in a way that cannot be dealt with.

We hope this email clarifies our proposal and answers many of your

questions before Euros Council. If you have any questions about this

registration system, please contact: reinier@amsterdameudc.org.

Kind regards,

Reinier de Adelhart Toorop

Deputy convenor Amsterdam EUDC 2010.

<*>Attachment(s) from Jens Henning Fischer:

<*> 3 of 3 File(s) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EUDC/attachments/folder/1952545116/item/list

<*> Details_registration_system_Euros.pdf

<*> Institutions at last 5 EUDCs.xls

<*> Simulation of EUDC Registration.xls