Hey all, we have a couple of announcements and things to cover today!
First off, conferences!
We’ve heard from a lot of you that gathering as a community is one of your favorite parts of the program. Currently, in most places in the world, there are recommendations or restrictions on travel and gatherings due to Covid-19.
Without a clear line for when it will be safe to gather in large groups, we needed to find a way to still encourage judges to connect, spread knowledge, and build relationships. Because of this, we are going to be re-evaluating the current policies we have in place regarding conference support. Starting today, due to the *hopefully temporary* extraordinary situation we are in, we’ll be opening sign-ups to apply to run a Digital Conference for your area for June, July, or August.
Once we have more data and see how those conferences turn out, we plan to re-evaluate and adjust as time goes on to see how we can best serve our members.
Conference Organizers can apply for 1 of 2 types of Support.
- One package includes conference promos for JUST the organizers/presenters, and is intended for those without the ability to distribute promos easily or monitor participation/attendance in a way that they are comfortable with. For this, the organizer will receive a single package with 3 conference promo packets for them, and enough promos for each additional presenter to receive 2 packs.
- The other option includes promotional support for all JA Judges from your region that attend the conference, in addition to the organizers and presenters. While some organizers may allow other judges to attend, those judges will not be eligible for promo support. For this, the organizer will receive a single package with 4 conference promo packets for them, and enough promos for each additional presenter to receive 2 packs, and each attendee to receive one.
In both options, the organizer is responsible for the distribution of conference promos.
Events that are accepted for support will need to be created on the Judge Academy Events tool.
If you’d like to sign up to organize a digital conference, you can find the link HERE
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Next, testing! At the moment, we’ve received a number of L2 Exam requests and checklist submissions that are being cancelled or needing to be put on hold due to Covid. Because of this, we have been looking into what it would take to have an option available to test for Level 2 remotely with the addition of the Level 2 Modules. This will be an open book, but timed exam. We are still working out the details, but wanted to make sure you all know that we’ve heard your requests and are going to do our best to make it work!
As a side note, waiting is also always an option. But we’ve had a number of people contact us wanting to take advantage of some of their freetime to buckle-down to study for the next certification level, so we wanted to make sure we addressed this asap. If you need any additional accommodations for testing, please email us!
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Finally, I wanted to share some information on the esports judge coursework. We’ll be reaching out to members of the Judge community to put together, not just a single class, but an entire track/badge for being an esports judge. This badge will be available to all L1+ judges for free, and will consist of 5 classes, and will result in a badge on your account certifying you to be a Judge for digital MTG events.
Those classes are:
- Intro to Online Events
- Organizing an Event (Promotion, staffing, etc)
- Policy Decisions for Arena
- Event Link Module
- Common Tools for Arena events (Discord, Melee.gg, etc)
We hope this will help set judges up to help run digital events for their stores or other TOs.
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That’s all for today. As always, feel free to jump in to Twitch Office Hours with any questions tomorrow (Wednesday) from 9-10am Pacific and 4-5pm Pacific.
buen dia
espero con ansias las clases, y poder seguir creciendo en el mundo del magic
Would be great in the events that are scheduled on JudgeAcademy mention which of the 2 types of Support they have chosen. They don’t seem to make any mention of it at the moment.
We’ve already asked organizers to make sure it is clear to attendees which type they are doing in their application/event page. If someone doesn’t, I’d suggest asking for clarification from the organizer, but this should be a small scale issue.