Status of the Judge Program: Winter 2018

| Jack Doyle

Hello judges! Spring has arrived and we want to let you know what happened in the last 3 months, and about the Program Coordinators’ goals for the next quarter. You can find previous Program Coordinators articles here.

Changes in the Sphere structure

New Technology Sphere leader: Paul Baranay

We want to give a great “thank you” to Lems for creating and driving this vital sphere for many years. Could you imagine how different the judge program would be without JudgeApps or without our blog network?

But fear not, we have the best possible leader for the Technology Sphere. Lems and Paul have been working together for years and they have ensured a smooth transition. We have great trust in Paul and we’re sure he will lead our platforms to even better standards.

Thank you both!

You can find details about the other existing Spheres here.

We would also like to remind you about the existence of the Organization Chart, you can find the list of current international projects here. If you observe any errors or missing projects, please let us know at mail-the-pcs@googlegroups.com, we’ll forward it to Zohar Finkel, the creator of and person responsible for the Chart.

Summary of Advanced Roles rotations

Goals of the Program Coordinators for the Spring-Summer period.

We are back to four Program Coordinators! Congratulations to the new PCs (Johanna and CJ) and to the renewing PC (Alfonso).

Now that we are back to a reasonable amount of Program Coordinators, we would like to take a more efficient approach and assign the leading of some areas to specific PCs. This doesn’t mean only one PC will work in this area or each PC will only work on their area. The PC in charge is responsible for controlling the timing and to lead the work to completion in that area, but many other people (and likely every other PC will contribute). These areas are designed as six-month goals. After six months we’ll set up new goals; some goals may be repeated while others will be new, according to the judge program’s needs. After those six months PCs will analyze the results and share a summary in the From the PCs desk article.

The areas:

  • Johanna Virtanen – Advanced roles rotation -&- Communication of the PC group.
  • Riccardo Tessitori – Quality and Level maintenance for all 3 levels.
  • CJ Crooks – Reevaluate the levels structure and propose future actions.
  • Alfonso Bueno – Coordinate and update the international projects and Sphere structure.

Messages and announcements from the Sphere Leaders
We’re adding this section to the Status of the Judge Program article, based on the feedback received at the Planar Bridge meeting in GP Seattle. The goal of this section is providing the program with an insight of what each sphere has done and is planning to do.
Translation Sphere – Juan del Compare
The translation Sphere has done a lot in the last months to have available the exams in Apps translated. At the moment we have the following exams in the following languages.
L1 Practice: Chinese (simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish
L1 Exam: Chinese (simplified), French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish
L2 Practice: German, Italian, Portuguese
L2 Exam: German, Spanish

More questions are added daily. The goal is to have enough content for at least two translated exams in each language, and the grand goal of having all the questions in circulation translated and updated when new content is added.

If you want to help with translations in your language, please contact Juan Del Compare and he’ll put you in touch with the projects in need of help.

This is the list of people working on the project in Apps:

Juan Del Compare; Mitsunori Makino; Julien Al-Rubei; Nemesio Alejandro Bolaños Gutiérrez; Alexey Chernyshov; Leonardo da Luz; Maximiliano de la Fuente; Raphaël Delbarre; Markus Dietrich; Hao Du; Arseniy Egorov; Lamberto Franco; Arman Gabbasov; Jérémy Ganivet; Arturo Garcia; Christian Genz; Mathias Grontzki; Loïc Hervier; Lev Kotlyar; Stefan Ladstätter; Ricardo Leite; Siyang Li; Eleazar Magnere; Sandro Manfredini; Rodrigo Mascarenhas; Nelson Mendoza Moral; Mauricio Morua; Asuka Nagashima; Jörg Nottebrock; Carlos Rangon; Nicolas Rosa; Xisco solivelles; Julio Sosa; Florencia Valle; Federico Verdini; Pierrick Visentin; Edwin Zhang; Herbert Zurita.

Technology Sphere – Paul Baranay
Paul would like to highlight this announcement about OpenID Connect Provider.

Players Investigations Committee – Johanna Virtanen
The Player Investigation Committee’s current term ends on June 30th. Applications for the 2018-2019 term will open soon and all Level 3 judges are welcome to apply

Levels Sphere – Alfonso Bueno
We’re currently working on an update of all levels and certifications. No major changes are planned; we are not creating the new-new-new world order. We’re just reevaluating some of the testing or maintenance requirements. Our expectations are submitting the draft for feedback to the leadership of the program in the next days, and then after acting on the feedback received we’ll make it public together with a survey to collect feedback from the entire judge program, hopefully during May.  After that, the Levels sphere will analyze the feedback and will keep permanently reviewing the levels structure of the judge program. However, we don’t expect any other change regarding levels during 2018.

The project of the Season:Leadership Meetings.  

This season we want to highlight a project that many of you may not know about: The Leadership Meetings.  Those are meetings of Level 3 judges, happening at most GPs and PTs. In them, present judges suggest topics that can be improved, present judges discuss them and brainstorm improvements and solutions. To guide the discussion we’ve some rules, the most important one is the discussion must be oriented to improve the judge program. At the end of the discussion of each topic, present judges, may create an Action Item, which is a specific set of actions, led by a volunteer judge and with a predefined goal.
The Leadership meeting project members schedule the meetings, find the organizers when they aren’t present and keep track of Action Items. The team of judges in the project are:

Leader: Christian Gawrilowicz.

Members: Riccardo Tessitori, Matteo Callegari, CJ Crooks, Nicola DiPasquale, Damián Hiller, Eric Levine, Sergio Perez, Ivan Petkovic, Edwin Zhang, Steven Zwanger, Alfonso Bueno.

The project contributors of the Season

There are many other judges contributing to different aspects of the program. We would like to highlight a few people doing awesome in their projects. We know there are many, many, many more judges going above and beyond in their volunteer contributions to projects, and we will be featuring more judges in the future issues of the Status of the Judge Program articles.

Grand Prix Santa Clara – Joe Hughto for his efforts to make judges welcome to the GPs with the Welcome to the Fold Project.
Grand Prix Indianapolis – Mike Gyssels for his work on the Articles project. He implemented a lot of structure, did a lot of heavy lifting in a time where the project was less active and had a large turnaround time.
Grand Prix Houston – Daniel Lee is one of the most active judges in the new set quizlet project
Grand Prix London – Saverio Adamo for the GP quiz.
Grand Prix Toronto Winter – Cassidy Melczak  for excellent work in the Judge Buddy Project and taking care of the people who are not the loudest at GPs (and are quite often overlooked). But there is a lot of knowledge and observation hidden in the introverts that by teaching them how to be more visible. I like your ambitious plan to make the project more international and global. I am happy to help!
Grand Prix Lyon – Sashi Loco for taking care of the GP Staff photography at many GPs.
Grand Prix Memphis – Joe Hughto for his valuable activity in the project “Welcome to the fold”, dedicated to all the judges at their first GP.
Grand Prix Madrid – Emilien Wild for the contribution to forum discussions (especially the tournament reports)
Grand Prix Phoenix – Ronald Thompson Judge Anniversaries project, Project Manager.
Grand Prix Santiago – Federico Verdini, very active and instrumental in the edition of the new L1 exam in spanish.
Grand Prix Amsterdam – Mikael Rabie for the card counting challenge.