By David Houseman & Michael Bury
BJCP Competition Management
Current Process
The BJCP is a virtual and volunteer organization. The tools we have in place have been around for nearly 20 years when competitions were almost entirely US based and we were registering less than 200 per year (195 in 2003). In 2019, pre-COVID, there were 895 competitions. So what’s involved in registering and reporting competitions? There is a master database maintained by BJCP IT. This is updated and copies are sent to the various groups that use it, like the Competition and Exam Directorates.
Registration
When someone goes online to register a competition, the system sends an email as an invoice to the organizer, confirming the registration and carbon copies the Competition Directorate. When the registration fee is paid a receipt email is sent to the organizer and a copy is sent to the Competition Directorate. We verify that the competition and organizer have not been black-listed for failing to file a prior organizer report or other offenses which then approves the registration. This then sends another email to us with the detailed registration information that we then use to load into a local copy of the database that we maintain on our laptops. Rather than do this all the time when a registration arrives, we process in batches often enough that registrations don’t wait more than two weeks, usually less than a week.
In processing a batch of registrations, we copy/paste the detailed registration information into the remote database, generate the registration letter and attach this to an email, along with a copy of the judges, and send that to the organizer. The process of approving the competition places it on the BJCP Scheduled Competition Calendar if the competition wants it posted. The AHA takes the information from the BJCP in an RSS feed and posts to the AHA Competition Calendar; this may take several days.
Organizer Report Filing
So now the competition can hold their competition. They have a list of judges to contact and invite. And the registration letter back to the organizer contains a password the organizer uses to file the online organizer report. In the mean-time, the Competition Directorate periodically exports the updates from our remote database to be included in the master database by the BJCP IT director. This is intended to happen about monthly, but everyone is a volunteer and the timing may be delayed as life often interferes.
After the competition, the organizer must file an organizer report within 21 days of the filed competition date. This can be done on-line or by emailing a properly constructed XML file of the required data. To file on-line, the organizer must find their competition in a pull-down list of competitions. The competition will only be present on the list beginning the day of the competition but then only if the master database has been updated with information transferred to the reporting site. We recommend that competitions be registered at least 90 days in advance for all the information to flow through the system. Late registrations may cause the organizer to have to wait to file their report. When the report is filed on-line, confirmation emails are sent to BJCP participants with the points they have been awarded and the points are placed in the database and can be seen by judges in their on-line record. When an organizer emails an XML file instead, these sit until such time as they are uploaded to the master database. When this is done the points will be visible in on-line records but confirmation emails are not sent to participants. However the Competition Directorate does mark the report received in another online site in order to prevent the competition from being placed on the Delinquent Competition List.
Manual Involvement Involving Modifications
Often organizers contact us to correct organizer reports. These are handled manually by the BJCP IT or the Competition Directorate, making changes to the master or report database. Organizers also often contact us to make changes to competitions, dates, URLs, etc. Again, these are handled manually. If a competition was registered a long time prior to the competition date, we are often asked to provide an updated list of judges so the competitions can contact new judges and to get updated levels, email addresses, etc. Again, these are all handled manually by the Competition Directorate.
Organizers get busy and forget to file their competition organizer reports. The competition then goes onto the publicly posted Delinquent Competition List. The Competition Directorate then has to contact the organizer to get these reports filed so that judges get their points.
Future State
The Competition Directorate has asked for major changes to the IT systems that support nearly 1000 world-wide competitions yearly. So, what would the processes look like when these changes are made?
Registrations and payments would still be done online, like they are today. However, when the Competition Directorate approves the registration, the system itself would send the organizer a registration email with their password. A single, on-line database would be updated with the competition information. With that password the organizer could log into the BJCP competition system and perform a number of operations listed below.
- Download the judge information they require.
- They could update competition information, such as the competition dates, themselves.
- They could file their on-line organizer reports and they could make updates to their organizer reports. They could upload their XML files. The system would check and verify the competition rules and provide feedback to the organizers if there are problems. Confirmation emails would be sent to the BJCP participants.
- Notices would be emailed to organizers reminding them to file their reports. If the competitions go onto the Delinquent List because the reports are overdue, notices would be emailed to the organizers and the Competition Directorate.
- Other changes would also handle internationalization with world-wide character sets and monetary systems.
In summary, the system would eliminate the current remote-master database concept with a single on-line database to which everyone has specific rights. And the overall competition registration and reporting system would be highly automated making it more friendly to the organizers and far less work for the Competition Directorate.
We are looking forward to the Board funding of this IT development and to improve the competition registration and reporting experience for the competition community.