From: Phrogz Date: 2007-11-10T01:55:00+09:00 Subject: Re: Current Quizmaster Retiring On Nov 9, 8:05 am, James Edward Gray II wrote: > Given all of that, I've decided that the end of my watch over the > Ruby Quiz has come. I will run ten more quizzes, so we can say that > I covered three years no matter how the count is done. Quiz 156 will > be my last challenge. I'd like to echo the thanks of others. Having authored and summarized just a few quizzes myself, I know how much time it takes all too well. I'm frankly amazed at your dedication that you kept it going this long. As I see it, ongoing Ruby Quiz requires: * New ideas for quizzes * Vetting of the quizzes (rejecting or improving bad ones) * Scheduling and running the Quiz itself * Interested parties actually solving the quiz * (Ideally) A good writeup/summary I'd like to direct this thread to brainstorming on how to make this feasible for the future. For sure, the simplest solution would be to find a new quizmaster to take the reigns. But even that would almost certainly be a temporary solution. It seems to me that this should be possible (like many open source projects) as a community effort with a small amount of steering by a group of individuals. Here's what I envision/propose: * RubyQuiz.com (or RubyQuiz2.com, or whatever) has an interface where anyone can submit ideas for new quizzes. Perhaps a public wiki for editing the quiz text, or perhaps a login-based system where only the author can edit it. (Or perhaps an option that lets the quiz submitter choose if it's publicly editable or not.) * Everyone can vote on upcoming quizzes, granting each a rating based on fun, estimated time to complete, difficulty level, and maybe even real-world applicability. Maybe there are flags for quizzes that involve performance optimizations, those that are about golfing, those that are NP-Hard and require heuristics, those that are about route- finding, and so on. * Possibly a small-ish group of admins is given the ability to change the scheduling of upcoming quizzes. * The application automates the posting of the quiz to the mailing list. * Ideally, the application monitors the gateway or ruby-talk archive for submissions with an appropriate topic and auto includes them in the listing of solutions and/or discussion. (Again, maybe admins have the ability to hand-pick posts to include.) * Although it would be nice for someone to volunteer to write up a summary, I'm not sure it's necessary. The summary might be implicit in followup discussions about solutions held on the mailing list. The potential downsides I see of this are: * Giving everyone visibility to upcoming quizzes takes a little bit away from the sense of competition. I like that everyone sees a quiz at the same time and starts working on it at the same time. It's not really a race, but at the same time the flavor of the event changes (I think) if people can spend weeks programming for an upcoming quiz and then drop a crazy huge solution. I feel that it would discourage smal- time hackers. * When the responsibility is on everyone's shoulders to submit quizzes, it may be that no one will step up. That would be disappointing, but not disastrous. If the queue is empty, there's no quiz that week. Maybe even the system sends a polite encouragement to the list asking for submissions in lieu of a quiz. The potential upsides I see of this are: * Seeing upcoming quizzes may give good ideas for interesting variations. I actually anticipate occasional interesting influxes that may queue up 10-20 quizzes at a time. * Voting for quizzes on multiple axes will record that information for newcomers to Ruby. Right now we say "Go browse the quiz site, and look for entries with lots of answers; they're probably easy." Wouldn't it be cool to be able to view all solved quizzes and say "Show me the quizzes that probably only take about an hour, with a high rating of real-world applicability, and that are rated moderate or difficult to solve?" I dunno how much of the above JEG II has already written for personal administration, but I bet it would be a nice starting step.