O2cm banned from NDCA events?

You'll note that she amended that later. The full quote from the rulebook is:


The rulebook only has allowances for electronic results from compmngr, but it does allow them.

My impression from various comments on the thread (I have not read the rulebook recently) was that although submission to NDCA might be compmngr records, organizers were required to retain paper for a specific period. I think there would be merits to such a policy.
 
Basically, you can physically watch pieces of paper. You can watch them being transported and otherwise handled. You can keep them in plain view of many people who are unlikely to collude while their contents are tallied into a result. You can double-check the tally without fear that the contents have changed. You can lock them up and feel certain that they will hold the same information when unlocked and re-inspected.

Ummm, yeah. Just like Chicago elections. ;-)
 
Uh ..... banks use electronic records for your money; brokerage houses use eletronic records for your 401k, etc. ... which is FAR more important to the vast majority of people than dance competition results.
I worked for an investment bank at one point in my life, for their IT department. They were keeping electronic records for all transactions, but they had to keep physical trail on those records as well, to be in compliance with assorted regulations. 7 years worth of paper records records takes up a lot of space and 7 years of electronic transaction records takes up a lot of electronic space as well (they were running into performance issues because of the amount of records they had to store). Obviously competition scores aren't banking records on many levels, but requiring business entities (and a competition is a business entity in this aspect) to keep paper records in addition to electronic records is not new.
 
Gotta say that I find it somewhat ironic that the NDCA would pay so much attention to the document retention policies of competition organizers when, per its most recently available 990, the NDCA does not have a written document retention policy of its own.
 
Ummm, yeah. Just like Chicago elections. ;-)

I did not claim that it is impossible to commit election (or scoring) fraud in the absence of electronic mechanisms. The Kennedy-Nixon election (a famous "Chicago election" example) was part of my research, and is merely one fairly recent example of a long history of election fraud schemes in the world. It seems extremely likely to me that I have studied more such examples than you have.

This and other snide/derisive/mocking comments notwithstanding, paper records possess certain useful properties (even, or perhaps especially, in the event that fraud is rightly or falsely claimed) that electronic ones do not possess. Every point I made still stands, in the post to which the quote above was directed.
 
For what it's worth, I don't have any problem with the idea that paper records have their place. It's just that, well, look. I love me some professional dancing. But in the larger scheme of things, the stakes are not actually that large, even at the biggest of competitions. The purses are small ($2000 for winning open pro at OSB) and lesson/show fees are surprisingly flat across the industry. (At least, I always found it a bit surprising.) Certainly there's the presitge factor, but still. While I'm not suggesting that your electronic intervention in impossible, I am suggesting it would be difficult for a non-professional to pull off in a timely enough fashion to matter. (Assuming a base level of competence on the part of the persons programming the competition software.) And that professionals would have far juicier targets that they could aim for.

Of course, none of this is to say that there's a down side to going ahead and printing out that binder full of score sheets and not throwing said binder away.

Also, I hope you haven't taken my posts to be snide, derisive or mocking. "Foolishly naive"? That I'll cop to. But I haven't meant to be rude. :)
 
You can hire a bunch of monks to copy the screen to paper
Only if they're properly illuminated!
…preferably on an 800k floppy disk lol
You must mean 360k. :D
I would imagine that errors from copying by hand thousands of marks every day are more significant errors than hacked scoresheets or failed software crashes.
...not to mention judges' poor handwriting and/or number duplicating or insufficient callback numbers.
 
Also, I hope you haven't taken my posts to be snide, derisive or mocking. "Foolishly naive"? That I'll cop to. But I haven't meant to be rude. :)

Thanks; I haven't had that impression of your posts in particular.

Putting aside the technical details and economics of malware development (which I do get the impression you haven't deeply explored): If you're protecting something of value *to you*, it's up to you to assure yourself in various ways of its safety. The integrity of NDCA results is (I expect) pretty important *to the NDCA*. Paper retention is a quite cheap way to enjoy certain protections and feel safe against certain types of harm (however unlikely/far-fetched others may deem some of those types of harm); so if I were walking in those shoes I might well see a paper retention policy as a no-brainer.
 
And allow me to repeat myself that a paper retention policy in no way precludes the use of O2CM. Collegiate competitions that use O2CM instead of CompManager have the exact same paper trail of judges sheets. If that is truly the concern of the NDCA, there is no reason to ban the use of O2CM. If they want to ban the use of PDAs, that would be one thing, but O2CM works just fine without them.
 
Sigh...I feel old...because I have an idea of what all this techie discussion means...:rolleyes:
 

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