Tabtastic rounds are designed to follow a very straightforward and consistent process, with a clear handoff with the tab. Once the draw is generated for a round on the tab and adjudicators have been assigned, you swap over to Tabtastic to handle the rest of the draw and motion release, and once adjudication has concluded you swap back to the tab to handle results.
Before Tabtastic can run your draw, it needs to be prepared on the tab. This means that you will need to confirm availability, generate the draw and allocate adjudicators in the tab for each round you want to run. Once these three steps have been completed, you can now swap over to Discord to run the draw with Tabtastic.
Now in Discord, you can start the draw process using !draw <hh:mm>, where <hh:mm> is the time you want to release the draw at (for example, !draw 09:00 will release the draw publicly at 09:00). Before starting the draw, Tabtastic will tell you which rounds it will draw, so you should check to make sure all the rounds you want to draw are there, but no others. If the rounds listed are correct, then click the tick to start the draw process. Rounds will be drawn by Tabtastic if the draw is marked as confirmed, but has not yet been released.
If you don’t want the meeting links announced to participants who are not active in the round, add --private to the end of the draw command (for example, !draw 09:00 --private). This will mean that links are only sent to active participants and to Orgcomm, but not as part of the draw announcement. This may be useful for outrounds such as finals, where you don’t want everyone joining the meeting if they are not participating.
For more details on the draw, see Draw Release.
Tabtastic supports a few different platform for hosting debates, and the instructions differ slightly for each.
Tabtastic only officially supports Zoom, Google Meet and Discord configurations, although it can still be used with other similar platforms.
Once allocations have been completed, Tabtastic will notify all participants of the draw. Any speaker or judge involved in the round will receive a direct message from Tabtastic with their room, private tab URL (for ballots and feedback), meeting link and position if speaking. An announcement will also be posted in the configured announcements channel, notifying participants of the draw being complete and providing links to all meetings, unless the --private option was used. A message will also be sent to the channel the draw command was executed in, with a link to each meeting, so that Orgcomm will always have a copy of the links.
Tabtastic allows for easy online motion release. Simply use the /release <hh:mm> command (for example, /release 09:05) to schedule the release of the motions for the current rounds. If the time is the current time, or in the past, the motion countdown will begin immediately. If the time is in the future, the motion countdown will begin before the specified time, so that the motion is released at the exact time specified. If an info slide is present in any of the current rounds, it will automatically be released before the motion. After the motion is released a prep timer will be started. You can cancel the motion release at any time by simply deleting the countdown message on Discord.
For more information about motion and info slide release, see Motion Release.
After the prep timer has finished, your round is good to go! Now you can go back to your tab to await the ballots for this round and take a break while the debates happen.