| State | No. of Members December 2023 |
Voting Numbers |
| Australian Capital Territory | 23 | 1 |
| New South Wales | 110 | 2 |
| Queensland | 71 | 2 |
| South Australia | 30 | 1 |
| Tasmania | 22 | 1 |
| Victoria | 137 | 2 |
| Western Australia | 49 | 1 |
The work of ratings officer meshes with the webmaster in several respects. Both posts being filled by Barry Harridge makes communication easy.
The webmaster updates the tournament calendar from time to time as they are informed. This helps the rating officer anticipate when results are in, and occasionally nudges for getting the TOU file.
The ratings officer has to inspect the TOU file. The filename may be changed to something easy to find later, eg BALL24.TOU, the event name may be edited for ease of recognition when displayed eg Ballarat Open. Badly spelt names may need to be fixed, and markers like tildes or @24 etc need to be deleted. The prior ratings come from rating.dat. This has many names. Some players who have not played for 8 or more years are archived in oldrats.txt and occasionally need to be retrieved. Players who have died are noted in oldrats.txt with the date of death.
The program plinratS.pl is then run. This creates files like BALL24.STA and BALL24.txt. The BALL24.txt is a human readable summary which may need to be posted to the mailing group, but in many cases this is not necessary, since the tournament organiser may have run pratcooker locally to prepare a .txt file for display. The updated rating.dat is also created.
The ratings officer then puts files into their local storage as eg /tournaments/24/VIC/BALL24.TOU and /tournaments/24/VIC/BALL24.TOU. They also update a very big text file will well over 3000 lines called archive.txt which lists every file in order eg
2024/QLD/QMARMAD.TOU
2024/VIC/FNS2203.TOU
2024/SA/SEAFORDM.TOU
From local storage these files are uploaded to the corresponding parts on the Scrabble Australia website. A program FlingFTP is useful for this. Once these steps are done, results are viewable by all, notably at https://scrabble.org.au/tournaments/cgi-bin/recentinfo.cgi
The ratings officer then runs several local perl programs which search through results of the previous several months to calculate qualification statistics for eg AMSC, WSC, TT, WYSC etc. FlingFTP then updates these to our website.
Perhaps once a month the ratings officer will run a program records.pl which calculates things like high game score etc and displys them at http://scrabble.org.au/tournaments/records/index.htm . However some data for this like high opening score, long word etc can only be found from information submitted. I suggest that tournament organisers be aware of this and encourage people to submit superior records.
The work has to be done carefully and takes an hour or so each week.
Occasionally the ratings officer is told of a mistake in a score. The ratings officer fixes this although it has to be done carefully.
There is a mechanism for planned redundancy in that when a TOU file is sent to nro@scrabble.org.au the file is actually sent to three people, Barry Harridge, Martin Waterworth and Edward Okulicz so that unexpected absences can be coped with. In the last few years, no fallback has actually been required.
I have outlined these aspects of the job, so that if anyone else would like to take on the job, they are welcome, and I could provide support and advice. They could act as shadow for a while if they wish.
I am willing to serve for the upcoming year, but would be happy to surrender the job.
Barry Harridge (National Ratings Officer)
MOTION: THAT THE COORDINATOR ORGANISES THE INVITATIONS FOR QUALIFIERS FOR
THE MASTERS/STATE CHALLENGE EACH YEAR.
Moved: Jane Taylor Seconded: Paul Richards CARRIED.
National Women's Championship MOTION: THAT CASPA COMMITS TO SANCTIONING
& PROMOTION OF AN ANNUAL NATIONAL WOMEN'S CHAMPIONSHIP.
Moved: Jane Taylor Seconded: Paul Richards CARRIED.
The meeting agreed that funding for the Masters/State Challenge and Nationals to be placed on the 2025 AGM Agenda.
The meeting agreed that all motions must be on the agenda no later than 2 weeks before the AGM.
Other items of interest to be pursued included: