This is Zohar again, bringing you an updated Global Judge Project Organization Chart.
So let’s go over what happened since the last chart was published way back in early 2017, and the changes that occurred over the past year:
The biggest change for sure was the termination of the previous massive Education sphere, followed up with the emergence of the new Coaching and Learning spheres.
Another change to the spheres structure is the merge of the former “L1 and L2 Sphere” and the “L3 Testing Sphere” (plus some projects that were left behind from the “L3 Sphere” way back) into a new Judge levels sphere. This is self explanatory, so not much to be said here.
There’s also the creation of the new Regional Communities Sphere, lead by Sebastian Pękala, and finally two changes in sphere leadership, with Jack Doyle
taking over as head of the Social Media & Web Platforms sphere, and Cristiana Dionisio
taking over as head of the Judge Conduct sphere.
The updated Org Chart now reflects all those changes.
Another change derives from Translations taking up an increasing part within the judge program – that is several projects have started a secondary goal of translating their content into multiple languages. Those projects are not always listed under the Translation sphere, and the leader of the translations is not always the leader of the project. In order to give credit where credit is due, and to allow volunteers who wish to help with translations know who to turn to, the Translations sphere now also lists those leaders. While there are only 2 for the time being, we expect more projects will follow.
The last change has to do with all the “independent projects”. To those of you who don’t know, independent projects are projects who don’t quite fall in any of the existing spheres, the sphere leaders don’t want them under their spheres for any reason, or the projects themselves don’t want to be associated anywhere. While [O]fficial projects enjoy a wide view on their place in relation to other projects, get guidance from their sphere leader, enjoy his or hers contact network within the judge program, and can even get foil recognitions for possible exemplary work, independent projects get none of that.
So, the first thing is that independent projects fall under the care of the program coordinators. That was always the case, and now the chart reflects that. Second is an attempt to better categorize them, as to better help the PC’s understand how to handle them in the future. Keep in mind that for the time being this is merely our suggestion for categories, and that it might change in the future:
- Support are projects who deal with judges helping other judges with things that are not usually part of a tournament, such as being disabled, balancing faith and judging, improving overall stamina, and even having mental health issues.
- Research are various projects who try to collect data for future uses, such as compensation, staffing, and player feedback.
- Organizational are a handful of projects who deal with structure and moderating of the judge program: Forum moderators, Sphere leaders, managing the exams we take, that sort of stuff.
- Last but not least are projects simply meant for judges social interaction and pure fun – games (including MOJO), acknowledging diversity, and even celebrating judging your first Grand Prix.
If you are part of a project that should be on the org chart but isn’t, know of a project shown to be dormant or inactive, see a project listed under the wrong sphere, or even aware of a new project manager – please let us know by sending me a message through judge apps.