Sep 08, 2023 At 01:13 PM EDT
The National Speech and Debate Association is not affiliated with the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues.
Tabroom is "mostly" his fault. That's how Chris Palmer begins his judge paradigm, a term for the viewable philosophy statement submitted by every registered judge on the speech and debate tournament program he created.
Back in the day, a tabulation room at a speech or debate tournament was a bustling place where coaches frantically worked over index cards and loose pieces of paper to calculate round winners, tournament speaker points, pairings and judge assignments. Now, thanks to Palmer, the tab room is much calmer.
Over 20 years ago, Palmer, a former competitive speaker and part-time debate coach, hatched the idea to make speech and debate competitions run more smoothly. As the world was becoming faster and more efficient in the internet age, Palmer believed speech and debate should catch up as well.
"[Tabroom] basically grew out of a desire to just make tournaments run faster," he told Newsweek. "I started thinking, 'There should be a better way to do this.'"
Today, Tabroom is hosted and supported by the National Speech and Debate Association (NSDA), which describes it as a tournament management system used by speech and debate tournaments worldwide.
"Tabroom [is] the proverbial information booth for any and all aspects of speech and debate," said Erick Zaragoza, a former Silicon Valley Urban Debate League debater who just started his freshman year at Princeton University.
Teams and students use it to register for tournaments, see round results and get notifications throughout the competition. It coordinates and announces pairings and room assignments and enables judges to enter decisions and scores digitally.
Outside of individual tournaments, Tabroom also lists upcoming competitions and keeps track of students' competition records throughout the year.
Lucia Hernandez, the assistant director of programs at Chicago Debates and a former debate coach, said Tabroom is "pretty intuitive" to use after students learn the basics of the program.
"It's pretty easy to work with once you get a hang of it," she told Newsweek. "I would say it's pretty user-friendly."
The first iteration of Tabroom started as a college class project for Palmer in 1999. While taking a computer science course, he developed a final project that had a database backend to tabulate public speaking events—"just a kernel" of what Tabroom would later become, he said.
Palmer said he had coaches in mind when creating Tabroom. His philosophy was that the less time people have to run around gathering this information, the more time they have with their teams.
"Debate coaches and speech coaches aren't always given a whole lot of extra time, they often have to teach a full course load in addition to running a team," he said. "You're traveling constantly. You spend more time in a Marriott than you do at home."
Before Tabroom and other digital debate software, tournament organizers and coaches were responsible for the point calculations and coordination for the entire tournament.
"Our most senior coaches would be spending a good half hour over a table doing simple math with a pencil on paper," Palmer said. "And the last piece of paper was always lost."
He said the process "took a long time" and left debaters and coaches "sitting around" waiting for judges to submit their ballots, results to be calculated and pairings to be matched up and posted on a piece of paper.
After years of experiencing this chaos firsthand, Palmer got the idea to automate the entire process with a program that could do simple arithmetic to make the process run more smoothly.
Palmer tinkered with the program for a few years after he graduated from college and ended up throwing out the original code and rewriting the framework around 2004.
"I did a complete overhaul and that basis, that foundation is what Tabroom still rests on today," he said.
The program only ran public speaker events for the first few years, as there was already a free debate software called TRPC that Professor Richard Edwards at Baylor University maintained.
Palmer and Jon Bruschke, a professor and debate scholar at Cal State Fullerton, received a grant from the Open Society Foundation to write the debate software into Tabroom around 2011.
Over time, the internet-based software of Tabroom gained an advantage over TRPC, which was a desktop-based system, and took over as the standard tabulation system. By 2014, their grant ran out and the NSDA approached Palmer about picking up the project and allowing him to stay on to manage the program.
Before he was a full-time employee of the NSDA, Palmer worked in the private sector in IT and technology management as well as in academia. He also worked part-time as a speech and debate coach at Milton Academy, Newton South High School and Lexington High School in Massachusetts.
The partnership with the NSDA allowed everyone in the speech and debate community to have access to the program, whether they are NSDA members or not, Palmer said. It also allowed Tabroom to integrate into the NSDA National Tournament and other major speech and debate competitions featuring teams from around the world with upward of 5,000 students in attendance.
"[Tabroom] has helped with the efficiency of the tournaments because it's all electronic," Hernandez said. "It makes sure [a tournament] is on time and the coaches feel like they can leave on time."
Hernandez adds that the program is very user-friendly for debaters who are used to organizing their personal and academic lives online.
"Before, we would have to print out the pairing sheet and post it up everywhere, and if you wanted to look at the pairing, you had to go back to the spot where it was posted," she said. "Now we don't have to [tell] students where they need to go, they can see that for themselves."
In the years since Tabroom's creation, Palmer said the activities of speech and debate have changed a lot. There are now thousands of competitions across the country each year, with some featuring teams from other countries.
Not every tournament across the country uses Tabroom. The Denver Urban Debate League, for example, uses a system called SpeechWire. But for other leagues, Tabroom has helped teams before they even arrive at tournaments.
"At a time when my high school's travel budget was extremely limited, the ability to filter upcoming tournament lists by state helped ensure that we could still be made aware of and debate at local tournaments," said Sheima Ben-Abdallah, an alumna of the New York City Urban Debate League who is now debating at Dartmouth College.
The creation of Tabroom also coincided with the expansion of the internet in people's lives.
Teams used to carry giant tubs of physical evidence, cards and other materials across the country. As the reliance on the internet and the cost of checking bags on flights grew, sharing online evidence files and "cutting cards" via digital documents became the norm. Additionally, Palmer noted that back in 2006, not every school had access to Wi-Fi—something that is much more common today.
And with the unexpected onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, all speech and debate activities moved online. Without a program like Tabroom, Palmer said it would have been much more difficult to adapt to the reality of remote competition.
Even before the pandemic, Palmer was adamant about staying connected to the "human side" of debate.
He said it is easy for him to focus on numbers and code and never see the people he's supporting in action because he's fixing things on the backend.
"I try to force myself to step out and actually watch the rounds," he said, adding that he judges maybe three debate rounds a year.
Palmer travels to tournaments big and small across the country as a way of "showing the flag of being present" but also to talk to the people who use Tabroom every day and hear about what works and what doesn't, what they like and dislike.
"I feel it's important for me in developing the site and improving the site to be the person sitting in the chair on a regular basis because when I have to sit there and click something manually 150 times, I can guarantee you there's going to be a button that does that automatically, whatever that thing is, in a week," he said. "And so…if anything is my secret sauce: that I'm also user."
Palmer is somewhat of a celebrity at debate tournaments, known mostly as Mr. Tabroom by young debaters.
"It's been kind of fun to become this bizarro-world minor celebrity," he said. "It always cracks me up how kids are like, 'Whoa, you wrote Tabroom?' And my standard response is, 'Well, someone had to.'"
The responses from students have been mostly positive, as they are always willing to provide feedback and ideas for improvements. Student suggestions are not often complaints about how the program is broken; they're more inquisitive and collaborative—true to the spirit of debate. Palmer said students often ask him if there is a way to add something new that would make everyone's lives easier.
As speech and debate return in person, Palmer said his role has become all the more important.
"There's a whole group of kids that back four years ago, they would have seen me at every tournament, and I would have just become part of the scenery after a while," he said. "But now no one has seen anybody in the tournament for a while, to some degree, so we're all a little bit more impersonal. And if anything, that has made me more of a mysterious shadowy figure, not just that tall guy who yelled at you to get through the debate on time."
Palmer is still working on improving the program. He said Tabroom's Achilles' heel is that it was written in a program that is two decades old. He said he is in the middle of rewriting it into something more modern.
Just like the expansion of the internet, the pandemic has forever changed the way speech and debate competitions run.
"We can't unring that bell. We're not going back to what life was like in 2019, it's a different world," Palmer said. "And watching that unfold is a little terrifying sometimes, but it's also kind of exciting."
