Heart of Europe International Debating Tournament will continue to use TabbyCat as the software for tabulating. This is an extremely convenient programme because of all the features it provides and that you will have easy on-line acess to the draws, your results and many more . There is no use to explain all the complicated things that stand behind TabbyCat, but in order to better understand the advantages of it, this article will cover five things worth mentioning. These five features have been chosen because they have a direct effect on the Tournament and are going to be implemented by our new Head Tab Master.

1 Electronic Ballots

The speed at which a debating tournament runs is highly dependent on the speed at which the results of the debates get to the Tab Master. This is exactly why along the normal paper ballots we will use electronic ballots. This means that ballots will be submitted by volunteers online in order to get them to the Tab as fast as possible. After that, they can be checked using the paper versions. This will enable the Tab Team to process the results and start the next round faster, thus the tournament will run smoother for the debaters.

2 Online Feedback

You can monitore easily your results at Heart of Europe which reunites people from multiple countries all over the world to debate. This implicitly means that, unlike at national or regional tournaments, there cannot be a CAP that knows all or almost all judges, therefore the CAP needs time to acquaint themselves with all the Adjudicators. In order to do this we will use feedback. Debaters and Adjudicators will give feedback after each round on other Adjudicators. In order to make this process as efficient and as eco-friendly as possible we will use online feedback that will directly affect the in-tab score of Adjudicators. This way, the CAP will be able to directly monitor the development of each Adjudicator and select the appropriate one for each debating match.

3 Identifiers

Nobody likes sitting in a room for tens of minutes just so the Tab Master can roll call all the teams present, even more so when we are talking about a tournament that is the size of Heart of Europe. This is exactly why we will usemake test year of identifiers at Heart of Europe. Identifiers are bar codes that you will have printed on your badges that will be scanned by a volunteer to mark that you are present in the announcement room. This means that the Tab Master will only need to call the people that do not appear as present via the scans, thus making the whole process faster and smoother. Easy check ins, scans of start codes of round, wil be done also by volunteers in debate rooms that the round is ready and has started, so the organisers will have idea about possible missing people or delays.

4 Motion statistics

Sometimes motions can feel unbalanced for debaters. Most times, it is just the bitterness of losing that makes the motion seem so, but for the cases in which a motion might actually be unbalanced, TabbyCat offers a statistical analysis that calculates and presents a percentage at which the motion might be unbalanced. Each motion used at Heart of Europe will go through this analysisafter we have had the results from the round.

5 Gender statistics

Sometimes as a society we suffer of different biases, including some gender ones. In order to analyse whether such biases affected the results at Heart of Europe we will have TabbyCat analyse how genders affect the general scores received by debaters each round. The analysis is a comprehensive one, showing broken down into different criteria like: whether the room is a high, middle or low one as general scores, whether there is a specific bias on different speaker roles and so on. This will help us correct such biases if they exist and this will help us make the judge allocation in accordance to the realistic possibilities of gender biases to exist.

You will find out more about the system of draws in next article. Now you can guess who will be our new Head Tabmaster.