Ballroom Competition Planning and Execution
FloorCraft Summary
FloorCraft is a competition scheduler. It is the newest member of the CIB family and is under very active development. It is not ready for end-users yet; however, interested developers are very welcome to play with the existing system and help get the functionality to both a useful and useable level.
Main Use Cases
FloorCraft has two main use cases: Event Forecasting and Detailed Scheduling. The full details of each mode will be discussed in the following sections, but in general you can view Event Forecasting as the orginal planning of the competition 6-18 months out; while the Detailed Scheduleing is typically done after the close or registration.
Event Forecasting
As indicated, Event Forecasting, is mainly concerned with the early planninng stage of the competition. This is the time for the event organizer to play with different sets of event offerings and figure out who much time will be required for their competition; or given a fixed amount of time in their venue, what events could they offer. In this mode the organizer is chiefly concerned with macroscopic views of the schedule; when a session starts, when the day ends. Typically speaking they wouldn't have to look too much at the round-by-round, minute-by- minute schedule. Ideally FloorCraft will have a reasonably powerful constraint system to enforce things like the "20 minutes between rounds" style rules, and thus further eliminate the need for tweaking the schedule at this point.
Detailed Scheduling
This stage is used as the competition nears and the "estimated" registration numbers from the Event Forecasting stage can be replaced with actual, or close to actual numbers. The organizer will be more involved with looking at the round-by-round schedule and possible tweaking the order of a few events to give breaks to either the competitors or scrutineers as they feel might be needed. They'll be Adding general dances for the spectators and/or warm-up times for the upper-level dances if needed, etc. FloorCraft might also be used to help pre-plann the judging panels, and suggest appropriate times for changing the panels.
Target Feature Set
This list is primarily a wish list and does not indicate which features have been implemented. As FloorCraft matures to a Beta application a more formal roadmap of accomplished and planned features will be broken out.
- Multiple or Split Floors
- Combined Events
- Events split across sessions (early rounds/late rounds or 5-dance components of 10/9-dance)
- Constaints
- Drag and drop re-ordering
- Maintain a list of named schedule variants for further comparison
- Easy customization of the schedule parameters and cut management
- Printable/web-postable schedules in detail or aggregate form
Download
You can download the current version of FloorCraft at the project download page. There is a jar file and a tar.gz file. The jar file is the psuedo-executable most users would want, please read the release notes for instructions on running it. The tar.gz (tarball) is the source for developers; or you can check out a copy from CVS.
Please remember that FloorCraft is currently "Pre-Alpha"; its functionality is extremely minimal and the user interface is crude. We're hoping to get the functionality to a more useful point in the near future followed by improvements to the UI.
