In the meantime Achte Minute has published scanned images from the front two pages of the tab.
Achte Minute was a new blog on the scene for this year's Euros but were the best source of updates from Newcastle. I've added them to my Google Reader and hopefully they will continue to blog about debating competitions they attend.
Hi! Thank you very much! Achte Minute is the official VDCH blog. VDCH is the umbrella organisation of german and german-speaking debating societies with 65 members from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy (South Tyrol) and Holland. We'll keep up blogging international tournaments in english while normally we are blogging in german.
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People have been asking me, so now I will start asking.
ReplyDeleteFor the last seven years I have managed the largest speech and debate tournament in the world, the National Forensic League's national championship speech and debate tournament, with over 5500 people. I know that it can be a hassle and a nightmare. And it can be thankless.
There was a debate tournament in Newcastle and it was the European Universities Debating Championship. Many who were there and many who were not there have some questions and it seems difficult to get answers. I understand that people are tired, but a simple posting of the results would be helpful and not take very long.
Results have been hard to get. If it wasn't for a few determined Germans and Filip Dobranic there would be hardly any information at all. The front page of team and speaker tabs have been scanned and posted by others. Many people would like to have access and there seems to be none. People on the later pages of the tab are curious. It is hard to report to the media how teams did when you do not know number of teams or numbers of countries. People want to see how their friends did, even if they are not on the first page.
The website for the event is at http://www.eudcnewcastle09.com/index.php and to the best of my knowledge has not been updated since June 2008 (that is the date on the "latest news" posting). In the "forum" section there are no posts.
The motions were thought provoking and interesting, but a few of them seemed to be prop killers and I would love to see the statistics on those before I start trying to copy their style. I wonder if such stats will ever be available?
There are many who were there who seemed very unhappy in their reports to me. The fact that a round had to be canceled because of delays troubled many. The reports about the food are disappointing but then debaters are hard to satisfy in this regard.
I would, on behalf of a number of others who are asking me about it, make an appeal to the organizers to publish the results and statistics as well as provide some background as to what happened. I feel that this sort of sharing helps the whole community and hopefully will help future tournaments.
We should not have to depend on some renegade attendee scanning one page of the tab in an age of instant and global communication.
Please do not interpret this as a lack of gratitude to the organizers. It was a tough job in a bad economic situation and the huge melt in entry from the original to the final list was also tough. I recognize the hard work that was done but a little follow-through would help.