Project Description

Goat is a tournament organiser assistant. It is designed to help run long tournaments that are primarily organised by e-mail, such as Toulouse's Permanent Go Tournament: a round is played each month, and it's up to the players to arrange their meeting time and place. Experience has shown that players need reminders to play their games, give results, etc. As soon as the number of players grows, it becomes unpractical to manage this by hand. This is where Goat comes in: after registering players, Goat can pair them, send the game details, and send remainders and collect results automatically. Players' ratings can be updated during the tournament to provide the best pairings possible.

Objectives

The final objective of the tool (see below) is to remove all human intervention in the process of managing the tournament. Further developments needed are: - Automatically managing registration and deregistration from the tournament (this requires human intervention at the moment) - A Web interface to interact with the assistant (all interactions currently take place using e-mail, which confuses some users). - Translation of the tool into different languages.

Realisation

The tool is published here. It is a Perl programme and requires a Unix computer that needs to be able to send and receive e-mail and publish HTML pages.

Resources

Just software and computer is needed. The largest obstacle to further developments is the lack of time.

Possibilities to copy this project

The tool requires further development to be used in new countries: translation of the interface, and inclusion of other countries' ladder data file format and tournament result formats.