Judging Management

The Judging management system is one of the most complex sections of SFIAB. It is intended to be used only by the chief judge.

Manage Judging Teams

This section allows you to manage the judging teams. Each team will be given a name and number and assigned to one or more awards in which they will be responsible for judging.

Manage Judging Team Members

The judging team members section allows you to add judges to each of the judging teams. A team can be as small as one judge, or any other size you choose. Each team can have a different number of judges, and each team can have one judge chosen as the 'team captain'.

Manage Judging Timeslots

The timeslots manager allows you to setup which timeslots are available for judges to use. Some fairs use very broad timeslots, such as "9AM-12AM" and assign many projects to be judges by a team in the same timeslot. Other fairs like having more control over their judges, and create very fine-grained timeslots, such as "9:00AM - 9:15AM, 9:15AM-9:30AM, etc". Using this system you can ensure that only one team is assigned to judge each project during each timeslot, avoiding conflicts with multiple judges trying to judge the same project at the same time.

Assign Timeslots to Judging Teams

Once the timeslots are created, they need to be assigned to the judging teams. Assigning a timeslot to a team allows you to (in the next section) add projects to those timeslots. Many fairs have different times available for divisional judging vs special awards judging. For example if special awards are only judged in the afternoon, then only those timeslots in the afternoon should be assigned to the team.

Assign Projects to Teams

Projects are assigned to teams during specific timeslots. You can add more than one project to a given timeslot, however remember that if you have very short timeslots, you should only add one project per timeslot to avoid conflicts. If your timeslots are very long, adding several projects to a team in one timeslot shouldnt be a problem.

Judging automatic scheduler

The judging automatic scheduler will allow the chief judge to automatically create the divisional awards judging structure based on several configurable options, such as the min/max team size, the maximum number of projects a team can judge, the total times each project must be judged, etc. The scheduler is actually split into two sections. The first section selects the best team members for each team based on the judges information, and the required teams. The second part assigns those teams to projects, ensuring each project is judged the required number of times, and avoiding scheduling conflicts.

Several pre-conditions are expected before the scheduler will run. On the scheduler configuration page (near the bottom) you will see feedback on all of the requirements. If a requirement fails (in red) there will be a link immediately below the failed requirement to take you to the section which requires changes to satisfy the conditions. For example, awards must already exist for all of the divisional teams, and no judging teams can currently be assigned to judge divisional awards. It also makes sure that there are sufficient timeslots available to schedule the judges. Once all of the pre-conditions are met, you will find a link at the bottom of the page to begin the scheduler. Running the scheduler may take 15-20 seconds, depending on the number of judges, number of participants and your scheduler configuration settings. Please be patient while it runs. Once it is complete you will see a great deal of information on the screen, mostly all just informational, letting you know what it has done. When the scheduler is done running (when the page loads) you can safely go back to the Judging Team Members, or Judging Teams, or Assign Projects to teams, to see what the schduler has done. You can also at this point make any changes to the teams or schedule that you want.

If you want/need to run the scheduler again (more judges signed up, change scheduler options, etc) you will need to re-satisfy all of the pre-conditions. The biggest part of this is removing all of the teams that were created. On the 'Manage Judging Teams' page, there is a link to 'Delete all teams assigned to divisional awards'. This will remove all of the auto-generated teams, as well as their timeslot & project assignments.