Bangladesh Universities TV Debate Championship 2007

Jagannath Hall from the University of Dhaka became champion in the final of the Bangladesh National Television Debate Championship which was held at the BTV auditorium in Rampura on July 3. Haji Muhammad Mohsin Hall became the runner- up while the 3rd and the 4th places were held by Rokyea Hall and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology respectively.

Uttam Roy, Animesh Kor and Rajib Sarkar were the debaters from the Jagannath Hall while Mohammad Enamul Kabir, Sheikh Ashiq Iqbal and Mohammad Masudur Rahman represented the runner-up.Eminent educationist Prof Serajul Islam Chowdhury presided over the competition. The main theme of the debate was 'Daridra Mukto Banglaesh Hok Muktijuddher Chetonar Ongikar' which translates as 'Let a poverty-free Bangladesh be the embodiment of the spirit of the Liberation War'.

In all 64 teams took part in the championship which is organised by the BTV every year.

US Universities Open

Dear Colleagues:
On behalf of Claremont McKenna College and the Claremont Colleges Debate Union, you are cordially invited to attend the US Universities National Open Debate Tournament, featuring national and international competition in theBritish parliamentary format.

The tournament is open to US and international colleges and universities. The event provides an opportunity to participate in national caliber competition in the BP format.The tournament features six preliminary debates and up to three elimination debates.

Like other intercollegiate events sponsored by the Claremont Colleges Debate Union, the tournament will offer genuinely outstanding competition and judging, beautiful site and facilities, the finesttournament amenities, and a relaxed schedule and atmosphere.

Registration for the tournament begins on Wednesday, August 1, 2007, 12:00PM (PST). Places will be allocated in order of registration date and time.Please consider registering early.

If you have any questions or require supplemental information, please do nothesitate to contact me.

I look forward to seeing you this fall for an event that will be extraordinarily challenging and fun.

Sincerely yours,
John K. Meany
Director of Forensics
Claremont McKenna College
Claremont Colleges Debate Union
Bauer Center
500 East Ninth Street
Claremont,
CA 91711
USA
(909) 607-2667
(909) 621-8249 Fax
john.meany@claremontmckenna.edu
www.debate.claremont.edu

Source: Global Debate Blog

Pan-Pacific British Parliamentary Debate Championship

Dear Colleagues:

On behalf of Hawaii Pacific University and Claremont McKenna College, you are cordially invited to attend the Pan-Pacific Championship Debate Tournament, October 27-28, 2007.

The event will be hosted by Hawaii PacificUniversity in Honolulu. The tournament is open to US and international colleges and universities.

The tournament features six preliminary debates and semi-final elimination debates. The event will feature the relaxing and magnificently luxurious tropical style of Honolulu, the beautiful site and facilities and friendly welcoming atmosphere of Hawaii Pacific University, and the tournament management prowess and amenities of Claremont McKenna College.

The top performing team will be designated as the Pan-Pacific Champion. The top performing US team will be designated as US champion. Registration for the tournament begins on Wednesday, August 1, 2007. Places will be allocated in order of registration date and time. Please consider registering early.

If you have any questions or require supplemental information, please do nothesitate to contact John Meany regarding tournament details or Jack Hart regarding travel to Hawaii. We look forward to seeing you for an event that will be extraordinarily challenging and fun.

Sincerely yours,
John K. Meany
Director of Forensics
Claremont McKenna College
Claremont Colleges Debate Union
Bauer Center
500 East Ninth Street
Claremont, CA
91711
USA
(909) 607-2667 TEL
(909) 621-8249 FAX
john.meany@claremontmckenna.edu

John P. Hart, Ph.D.
Assistant Dean,
Professor College of Communication
Hawaii Pacific University
1132 Bishop Street
Suite 510B
Honolulu, HI
96813
USA
(808) 544-0805
jhart@hpu.edu

Source: Global Debate Site

MIEDC 2007: A week till registration ends & prizes

This is a gentle reminder that the registration period for MIEDC ends in just a week i.e. 8 August 2007 (wednesday), 11:59pm (Malaysian time). We already have some teams from Thailand and India as well as a good number of local institutions registered with us, such as IIU, UiTM, UM, UPM and many more. We are looking for more institutions to make up a good mix of debate teams. So those of you thinking to come, do act fast and register yourself.

We are allocating MYR 5 000.00 for prizes. There will be cash money, trophies and books up for grab. Prizes are prepared for the champion, runner-up, overall best speaker and best speaker for the final round. At the end of the day, though, we are promising a good debate experience and a event-full three-days program.

So book now to confirm you place.Hoping to see the debate community in IIU this 18 - 20 Aug!

Worlds 2009 Report / ESL-EFL / Worlds 2008 Rego

Dear All,
I hope this email finds everyone in great health and spirits.

I. 2009 Worlds I would like to thank Art Ward, Derek Lande, and the entire Cork Worlds 2009 Team for their July report. You may find a link to the file in the message attached to this email or just click on this:http://z13.zupload.com/download.php?file=getfile&filepath=78651 Any comments or concerns must be forwarded to your national or regional representatives. They in turn will communicate your sentiments to the Worlds 2009 organising committee.
(Editor's note: This is a large file (36MB). You might want to bear that in mind before downloading on a dial-up connection.)

II. The ESL-EFL Committee It is with great pleasure that I name Lars Duursma as the Chair of the ESL-EFL Committee. The purpose of this committee is to discuss and formulate a constitutional amendment to be considered at council next year on the issue of the EFL competition. He may be contacted at lars.duursma@gmail.com . I would like to thank him for accepting the role.

III. Worlds 2008 Registration Thanks to TJ, Rish, and the whole Assumption Worlds 2008 Team and their continued tireless work, the registration for this years event has been quite phenomenal. However, I have noticed that some "institutions" registering for Worlds are not quite legitimate. I will ask the organising committee to forward us the complete list of registered teams during their Verification Phase (1st September - 4th September). We will then ask the committee to return the funds to the constitutionally ineligible teams and drop them from the list. It's simple, if you created your own institution/fragmented an existing one to circumvent the team cap, just withdraw your entry now and save yourself some embarrassment and drafting/wiring fees.

Thanks for your kind attention.
Cheers,
Ian Lising

EUDC update

Dear All Euros Participants,
As you remember from the beginning of the announcements, we are going to pick you up from airports and train-bus stations. This mail aims to inform you about the scheme we planned for ensuring arrivals without any problems. We have arranged shuttles leavings airports/stations in two hours (in a flexible way of implementation) by considering density of arrivals. As you guess, it is rationally not possible to realize transportation from airport to Koç Campus without waiting. Therefore, a very small part of the participants will have to wait not exceeding 1,5 hour. Tha's why we're kindly asking you to take your MP3 players and favorite books for the leisure time.

For any kind of problem, such as delays of arrivals, please don't hesitate to call our Greeting Officer, Ozan Ondes. His contact number is +90 536 223 89 85.

According to immediately notified delays, re-planning will be solving all potential matters.

Regards,

Harun.

--

Harun Ercan

Chief Organizer of

European Universities Debating Championship

EUDC2007

harunercan@...

M.Phone1: +905337640475

M.Phone2: +905056353027

Tabbie, BP Debating Tab Software, Version 1.2 released

Hello debaters,

First of all, sorry for cross posting. I think the subject of the mail actually does cross the different lists and can be justified as such.

In this email I'd like to:

• Introduce Tabbie BP Debating Tab Software
• Introduce its history
• Call to participate and share
• Claim the best current draw algorithm in the world
• Announce Tabbie 1.2

Tabbie is web based BP Debating Tabulation Software. It can be found and freely downloaded at: http://tabbie.sourceforge.net/ . Promo snipplet of properties:

• Official. It uses the official WUDC rules to calculate its draw.
• Safe and stable - It's been tried in practice at a tournament as large as NTU Worlds 2004 with great success.
• Fair. Tabbie currently has the best known implementation worldwide of the draw algorithm, giving the most balanced distribution of positions in the debate to the teams. (More info)
• Scalable for large tournaments: It is web based, you can use multiple computers for inputting data.
• Easy. Things like customized adjudication sheets for the tab can be created in one click.
• Open and Free. Its source code is freely inspectable. You can inspect any file (like the Draw Algorithm), and modify or add anything you like. Download is free.
• Alive. As of July 2007 changes are being made to make it work even better.

History, State of the art, Uniting Tab Software

I found Tabbie on Flynn's site when looking for a piece of software to run the IDC tournament we had last week and which ran very smoothly, partially thanks to Tabby (this message is strangely unrelated to IDC's bid for Euros today). I was looking for something stable, adaptable ( i.e. open) and cool (nice forms etc.). Tabbie turned out to have these properties, though installing it required more than average computer skill (i.e. fixing the whole thing up).

Looking around I noticed the following: The amount of different pieces of Tab Software that are produced once by some wizard and then left by the roadside after the wizard leaves is unfortunately quite high. As far as I know (based on googeling and flynn.debating.net) the current state of the art is such:

• Cragie Tab - Excel - used a lot. (I personally don't want to mess around with excel)
• Tournaman - Delphi - used a lot in Germany. (I didn't want a closed source system)
• Zorro - online system - I have no idea how to get in...

other systems seem even less maintained. However, I may miss some important systems here and would love to have them pointed out to me (and the community). In general, there are a lot of important tournament of which I have no idea which software they are using.

Tabbie seemed to fit into the "left by the roadside" pattern - it dates back to the NTU / Singapore Worlds 2004. I have no idea if anyone used it since. (I would like to thank Colm Flynn for preserving this excellent piece of software, when the original source had already long gone.) Anyway, I've dusted it off, provided some easier installation module and changed some things to my liking / understanding. The result can be inspected (live) at http://tabbie.sourceforge.net/run/

More importantly, I'd like to try to finally break this pattern of "use once" tab packages. This has been a bit of a spare-time activity and I am definitely not planning on monopolizing development. I have, therefore, created a repository at sourceforge.net (an open source platform). Anyone who wants to join - send me a mail and I'll put you on the developers list.

Participation - Specifically

Specifically, there is a lot that can still be done:

• I'm very interested to hear who is actually using Tabbie. Feedback of all kinds is very welcome.
• Tell us how easy/hard Tabbie was to install on your system. (Since Tabbie is Web Based, installation is more complicated than downloading an excel sheet or exe file. An installation guide is provided, but I would very much like to hear if people have trouble installing to get into contact with me so we can have a truly easy to install system.)
• Report any bugs
• Fix any bugs
• Request a feature
• Add nice pictures and colours
• Add stuff that you use in mail-merge like ways (powerpoints, pdf's etc)
• Add a feature yourself, and upload it
• Become a developer

As you can see, many of these things do not require either a long time commitment, or much programmers knowledge, so join in....

The Draw Algorithm:

To open up the debate I would like to claim the following: Tabbie currently possesses the best algorithm world wide that complies to WUDC rules. More about this claim can be found at http://tabbie.sourceforge.net/draw_algorithms.php (high technical level). I would like to invite anyone with a better algorithm to present it to the debating community. Also, I know that there are algorithms out there that are specifically not WUDC but could be interesting for some users. I'd love to see their source code.

Version 1.2.:
Specific changes for the newest version.

• The print module has been reorganized (cleaned up)
• The live demo now supports "one click pdf": ( http://tabbie.sourceforge.net/run/rest.php?result_type=pdf&function=adjudicator_sheets&param=1)

regards,

Klaas van Schelven

Hong Kong BP Workshop 2007 Starts

Hong Kong Debating Society's Summer Workshop is starting from july 30. this BP style workshop includes 6-day camp, students will be coached by the World’s top debaters, adjudicators and trainers in British Parliamentary style debating – the international debating format. This year’s trainers include the former World Debating Champion (2006), and the former Chief Adjudicator of the World Universities Debating Championships (2005).The Workshop is aimed at students continuing University, although younger students may also be considered. Debating experience is not a must, but is preferred.

Date and Location
Monday 30th July – Saturday 4th August
New Asia College, Chinese University of Hong Kong

The first two days of the Summer Workshop programme consist of small-group workshops, followed by three -days of competition debating. The last day (Saturday) will consist of a finals series, culminating in a public Grand Final debate in which the top four teams will compete for the HKPDS Cup. The Summer Workshop also features evening talks from top Hong Kong and international figures; past guests include the Hon. Ms. Rita Fan, President of the Legislative Council, and English Members of Parliament the Hon. Mr. Paul Keetch and the Hon. Mr. Nigel Evans.
Source: http://www.hkpds.org/index.html

7th UAE Skyline Crossfire Debate Tournament 2007

This Picture is taken from 2005 UAE Debate Championships

Dear all,

The University of Wollongong in Dubai 'Speech and Debate' team wins again with another impressive performance in the inter-collegiate competition circuit.

The UOWD debating team of Sonia Manek and Samarth Meherish competed against 8 other UAE universities in the 7th annual Skyline Crossfire Debate Tournament held recently in Sharjah, UAE. Samarth was named Best Speaker for the Motion, winning the top rank and trophy. UOWD was narrowly edged out for Best Overall Team by MAHE-Manipal.

The team was coached by UOWD faculty members Melissa Bos and Swapna Koshy.

Regards,
Rashedul Hasan Stalin

Slovenia Fifth International Debate Academy

What is it about?
It is the most international British Parliamentary Debate Training in the world with a distinguished training group. Attendees have come from over 26 different debating nations. The program involves a rigorous combination of lectures, skill exercise sessions and two practice debates per day. A major tournament will take place at the end. This year the tournament at the end of the Academy is open to all interested university debaters, so everybody who does not have time to come for the whole week, can join us only for the tournament.

THREE EVENTS
1. WORKSHOP FOR UNIVERSITY STUDENTS
2. WORKSHOP FOR TRAINERS, COACHES AND TEACHERS
3. AN INTERNATIONAL TOURNAMENT

Only for university students and trainers/teachers
17th – 25th November 2007, Ormož, Slovenia

Organized by
ZIP – Za in proti (ZIP), Pro et Contra, Institute for the Culture of Dialogue, Slovenia and WDI

Dates for the whole Academy
Arrival: Saturday, the 17th, opening of the Academy at 5 p.m.
Departure: Sunday, the 25th late afternoon

Application deadline: October, 15th 2007
To Register and For Information:
Director of communication and registration: Sintija Dobrotinšek, ZIP, sintijadobrotinsek@yahoo.co.uk

Regards,
Rashedul Hasan Stalin

From: Bojana Skrt bojana.skrt@siol.net http://debate.uvm.edu/idas2007.html

IDC Herzliya EUDC 2008 BID

IDC Herzliya are bidding to host Europeans in 2008.

Details of their bid can be found at http://eudc2008.kamil.org/

EUDC2007 | Final Announcements

Dear Debaters of Europe,

As you all know, there's less than 10 days to Euros 2007. On behalf of the Organization Committee of EUDC2007, I would like to make some final announcements to make sure that you are fully prepared for what should be an awesome week and also to ensure that we know everything we need to at our end so that things don't go wrong when you arrive. Please read carefully to the end as we will include information of what you should bring (including dress codes for events), what to do when you arrive and for judges, how you can go about doing our online adjudication test.

I wish you all a safe journey to Istanbul and see you on the 5th August.

Riza Isýk
EUDC 2007
Convenor

Korea University Open Mini IV Results

Champion: Team "D", composed of Soo-hyun Yoo, Sumi Park, andSungkwan Jung

Runner-up: Team "B," composed of Heejin Ahn, Mikyoung Kim, and JieunYoo

Best Speakers
1. Youjin Chung
2. Sumi Park
3. Taehyun Kim

Monsoon-Summer Debating in Bangladesh

Each year during the summer in Bangladesh different debating activities picks-up with the new arrival of Monsoon and different seasonal fruities. Summer songs click the debaters to start the slice of debating activities in different educational debating organizations. This institution each year arranges summer debating for their students extracurricular and celebrates the Monsoon and its flavor. This activity includes different food festivals, cultural carnivals and in schools debating. This article will contain some of these summer schools debating activities in Bangladesh.

AUB Summer Debate Competition 2007

AUB Debate competition 2007 was organized successfully by Asian University Debating club to celebrate the Monsoon Day. The final round was on 26th June 07. The program consisted of prize giving ceremony, declaration of new commitee and reunion.A public speaking program was held. The champion crest won by Rawshan Ara Lubna from English department -10th batch.In debating, the champion team were Daisy, Ferdous, and Taposh from BBA dept.

Festive Fresher's Summer Debate in BUET

BUET Debating Club recently organized the Fresher's Debate Championship in this summer. It commenced from the 21st of June and ended with its three day program on the 23rd of June. Debaters from both the batch-05 and batch-06 participated in the program. Public Speaking was also a part of the program. On the first day of the program, preliminary round debates were organized in the traditional format. The topics of the first round focused on the current national issues. Five winning teams along with three best losers advanced to the second round. Debates were simultaneously conducted at the seminar room and the auditorium of BUET. The best speakers from this round were selected for the public speaking.

Debate Competition 2007 held at Chitagong University

University of Chitagong (CU) the best summer school campus in the city organised Inter-Year Bangla and English Debate Competition 2007 from 2-7 June. One Bangla team and one English team from each of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th year from this department took part in the competition. The main event started on 2nd June at around 10.30 a.m. All the debates of the preliminary round were held on 2nd and 4th June where the competitions were really tight and the results were very close. After the very interesting battle of words, 1st year and 3rd year moved into the final of Bangla Debate competition by beating 4th year and 2nd year respectively.

SDF Summer Debate Championships 2007

With the association of Stamford University, Bangladesh the 3rd Inter Department Debate Competition of Stamford Debate Forum has begun on 23 June,2007. The teams were selected at Stamford's Siddeshwari Campus through a lottery. In a show debate Aninda Rahman, Nazmul Islam Shovon of Dhaka University, Shaifuddin Rana of United International University and Abdullah Mohammad Sukrana, Md.Monir Hossain and Abdullah Al Rezwan of Stamford University, Bangladesh took part. In this 8 day long debate program, 28 teams of the Bengali section and 10 teams of the English section are participating. The final debate of the Inter Department Debate competition was held on 30 June, 2007.