To league management providers and graders …

Colleagues

This consultation is aimed primarily at providers of chess administration software providers. Many graders have systems that might benefit and other graders might be interested in what is going on.

The ECF is introducing a 4-digit Elo based monthly grading system due to be implemented in September 2020. The existing cycle is to produce lists every six months. The ECF Board have agreed that existing procedures can remain in place and the new calculation method takes this into account. Nonetheless it is the hope that graders will support the push for accurate more frequent lists. Clearly there is a need to make submission less time consuming effort to encourage this support.

The ECF has already invested in a League Management System (LMS) that supports on-line entry of results. For the January list, for the first time, graders could elect for the LMS to submit their results with no intervention from them. Under the bonnet, the LMS produced traditional e-mail submissions which were manually input into the existing system. We learnt a lot about the practicalities of uploads by this exercise, but while this could ease the load for graders more work emerged for Matt Carr our administrator. It was not envisaged to be a long term solution.

This forms the background for this consultation.

To be clear, graders will be able to continue sending results using the current submission format, and under the existing timetable for the foreseeable future. But they may get pressure from players to move to a more frequent submission. ECF is keen to partner with software providers in addition to LMS in our common goal of assisting organisations.

In parallel with the work above the grading team have been discussing, with Malcolm Peacock at LMS, automatic submission of results direct into the grading database. A small team has started building our new grading database as phase 1 of a bigger project. Phase 2 will be looking at accepting results direct from providers with the intention of making all submissions automated with issues highlighted for checking where necessary.

We foresee new interactions to administer player grading records (the membership payment system will provide input into the new system but will not be accepting any output). There will also be a need to keep track of events, including congress sections and league divisions, matches etc. The grading system should then be able to provide downloads back to organisations.

The attached document gives some details of the expected results formats and on the direction we are proposing. We will be accepting uploaded submissions in the current text format (the .xls version will only be acceptable in the existing email submission method) and have also set out a new JSON version.

Our proposal for the communication is the new JSON format. We are also looking at requests for a REST API to support grading downloads and would welcome any inputs on this. We are very interested in your feedback on the approach and the specifics of the newly proposed JSON formats. We are not expecting to accept all forms of communication to upload the results data, but are looking at priorities in this area. We are interested on views about using ftp, email, web entry and REST API.

We remain receptive to ideas in this area but given the timetable comments should be made by 16th March please.

These submissions can be by email to manager.grading@englishchess.org.uk. However we are looking at setting up a closed forum to facilitate other systems issues that can be discussed usefully. We will contact you with an invitation to join if that goes ahead.

— Brian Valentine, Manager of ECF Grading