Excellent suggestion!
I have looked into this a bit in the past, and it’s something that I would like to be able to provide, as the OmniScore product being used for Nationals at this point is outdated, for sure. That being said, it’s a system that works and so it’s hard to convince someone to front the resources that would need to go into building a new product. The fee paid for a single Omni Score judged event isn’t enough to cover the development of a new product, but the use of such a product could pay for its development time over a number of years.
After I’m able to get enough dropzones using RealDropzone, I could look at re-investing some of the license dollars coming in to be able to create a module that allows for real-time video judging, and sharing the results on a webpage – but that will likely be at least a few years out to fit into our budgeting.
If we created a solution that used wireless laptops as the judging interface, it would eliminate the need for custom hardware, which would mean that ANY dropzone could use the product ANY time for ANY event they would like to host – from NSL events to just local competitions… and at no extra cost.
If this is something that a lot of dropzones would be interested in then it could be officially put on the road map for future capabilities, but it will be the RealDropzone subscribers that would need to indicate that this is one of the new capabilities they would like their license fees to support. After we get a decent users group (over 10 subscribing dropzones) we’ll start to have open discussions on these forums about what new capabilities are most important to everyone.
In the meantime if someone wanted the solution as a stand-alone product and was willing to front the initial development, it could be created as a separate product. One of the first things that we would need to do in either case is to establish exactly what the requirements of the product are going to be – so that we can have a better idea of what it would actually cost to develop.
It would be great to get some more specific details about what such a product would need to be able to provide to be used at competitions of all sizes. Perhaps if you are very familiar with the process you can help to define those requirements are.
To get you started – what is the workflow of how a competition would be judged. How much of the workflow dictated by using OmniScore needs to be maintained and how could it be changed to be improved?
There are a number of different steps:
- Event Definitions
- Team Definitions
- Competitor Definitions
- Video submissions.
- The judging process (user input)
- Result communication (displaying judging results real time, and recording electronically for online sharing)
What have I missed, and how can these steps be more fully defined? Also, what are the peiced of data that need to be collected and organized, and how do they relate to each other? For example:
- What do we need to know about an event?
- What do we neeed to know about a team?
- What do we need to know about an individual in a team?
- What do we need to know about a judge?
- What do we need to know about a video?
- What information do we need to collect from a judge about a particular video?
Perhaps we can get some others to jump into this conversation and get some idea going about how the product could be architected...
Blue Skies,
Matt Christenson