feisresults.com - services
In The Beginning - a story of tabulation
There were a lot of people sitting around a table with broken pencils worn out rubbers and a look of desperation. The halls were full of sleeping parents and children lying under and on any available piece of furniture. Waiting 3 hours for a recall was normal and if the result came out before the dawn chorus it was a miracle. Were the recalls and results accurate? Who cared at that time of the morning?
Cometh The Computer Age
About 20 years ago a couple of us got together and after many hours, days, weeks months we created a computer based system which sort of worked. Except of course when it didn’t. This was mainly because the floppy discs had a bad habit of failing, normally at a crucial moment. There was also the problem that those early computers just didn’t have the power or reliability, and add to that our ignorance, we had some fun. So over the next 15 years we developed and upgraded and learnt, and developed and upgraded and learnt. Every problem that occurred, every mistake, we examined and worked to exclude the possibility of it happening again. Today we are still upgrading our systems and working on improving the service we provide to everyone who enters the world of Irish dancing competitions.
Cometh The Internet
The internet offers much in the way of opportunity, so we took it and developed an on-line entry system for Championship events and of course, “feisresults.com”. At first, the website was just a portal for results from the events we tabulated but grew to be a medium for our embryo live commentary and other useful information about an event.
The idea for ‘Live commentary’ was born whilst lounging around between competitions somewhere. Simply there to provide a real-time update to a particular event, the idea proved popular with the fans of Irish dancing.
At the Worlds 2006, our site was taken off line by our hosting company as it was getting too much traffic, causing other customers problems. That raised some issues for us because we needed to spend some money on a dedicated server to better enable us to provide the service we’d like to. Sadly, our income from tabulation doesn’t meet the cost of dedicated servers.
We also created an add on at the 2006 World Championships to post recalls in real time after a lot of requests from yourselves, but this just increased traffic even more until we were shot down in flames by our hosting company.
So now we have to be very conservative with our online activities.
Tabulation
You all know what tabulation is; it’s adjudicators marks, taken by a couple of geeks, messed around with, allocated grid scores, messed around with a bit more and there you have it. Not rocket science. That’s what we used to think 20 years ago and you all have a point. But the trouble with that is that you have to take into consideration human beings, machines that break, a missing .5 that changes everything and so on.
Our Methods / Philosophy
A few years back, learning from our own mistakes (which were fixed within an hour, before you start asking where and when), we decided that only a combination of Adjudicators, Tabulators and Feis Organisers working as a team could solve the error problems once and for all. The established idea of Adjudicators and Tabulators and Organisers all operating in their own separate worlds just doesn’t work. So we went back to the drawing board again and rebuilt parts of our systems and came up with a method that works as follows:
Having tabulated the first two rounds and run our checks and if necessary corrected anything that we had found, back to the adjudicators, via the organisers. We produce individual adjudicator recall check sheets, which show the recall dancers with their sub totals and that adjudicator’s position for the dancers.
The organisers will not announce the recall until each adjudicator has confirmed that their recall is correct. After the recall and the set marks are added, again a check sheet is produced for each adjudicator showing their final result. The final result will not be announced until they have signed off their result. Finally of course we produce a set of marks, which you the parents and teachers can study.
And that's about it!
This is what we can do for you
- Online entry
- Programme production
- All printing needs
- Tabulation
- Results projection at the event
- Results online via feisresults.com
- Results online on your own site if applicable
- Produce Marks/Results sets for sale