Published on

Competitive Programming Initiative Handoff

Hello everyone,

It’s time for the Competitive Programming Initiative to undergo a leadership change as most of our Core team resumes college or enters senior year!

Some notes on organizational hierarchy

  • Organizational hierarchy helps maintain accountability from everyone.
  • Too much organizational hierarchy is inefficient and bureaucratic.
  • Previously the CPI had too little organizational hierarchy.

Our organizational hierarchy has been improved to the following:

  • Executives: Lead the organization and make decisions, after consulting the necessary people. There should be at most three of these positions.
  • Project Manager: Lead a certain project, such as CPI Clubs or CPI Online Code Submission platform. USACO Guide Content Managers also fall under this category. Reports directly to one of the executives. There should probably be 5-10 people holding these positions.
  • Content Author/Contributor/Team Member: pretty self-explanatory.
  • Lead Technical Advisers: People with important technical or leadership experience who serve in an advisory role for the organization.

Leadership Team for 2021-2022 School Year:

  • Executive: Maggie Liu, Melody Yu
    • USACO Guide Content Manager: Open, unknown number
    • USACO Guide Content Author: Open, dynamic number
  • Lead Web Developer: Open
    • Web Developer: Open
  • Classes Project Manager: Jeffrey Meng and Daniel Guan (until second semester only; then new project manager)
    • Class Instructor: Open
  • Outreach: Open (Runs webinars, workshops, etc)
  • Clubs: Michael
    • Club Curriculum: Open
  • Contests: Michael
    • Contests Logistics: Open

I (Nathan Wang) personally hope to see CPI stabilize its offerings next year, to set the foundations for future expansion in the years after.

  • The USACO Guide is an example of a “stable” offering -- it’s well-known; it’s dominant in the field of “free resources for USACO;” it’s growing organically through word-of-mouth, google searches, and usaco.org website; and it has a vibrant community around it that helps it continue growing
  • Web development: We need to find more web developers that help maintain sites full-time
  • Classes: We’ve experimented with both live classes and video classes. I think both have their pros and cons. However, we still have a ways to go before it’s “stable” like the way USACO Guide is “stable.” The quality of classes still needs to be improved; a pipeline for recruiting instructors is still necessary; we still need to improve advertisements of classes; etc.
    • We may also be able to release solution videos from video classes on Youtube with appropriate branding to help grow CPI / USACO Guide. We do not really need the money from video classes.
  • Outreach: We’ve had two successful webinars/workshops. We should run these on a regular basis, especially with “Intro to USACO” webinars before USACO season. We should figure out how to promote these better, and also explore webinars/workshops beyond just “Intro to USACO.”
  • Clubs: We have club resources, but there are issues and they should be better maintained. We should increase outreach. We should check in with clubs more regularly. Registration process is sort of wack. Groups LMS needs to be used more. etc etc see YEI https://theyei.org/
  • Contests: We’ve successfully proved that there is interest in this area, and a “shared newsletter” system across contests can work. We should expand to more contests, solidify the newsletter, get more people on the newsletter, etc.
  • Recruitment: There is no recruitment pipeline other than the USACO Guide Content Author. We should create a proper recruitment pipeline similar to the YEI: https://theyei.org/people/apply. This year I think it will be very difficult to build a strong leadership team just because we haven’t really had a proper “organizational hierarchy” with people to pick from. We should aim to recruit more people so that we can have a more stable transition from each year to the next.
  • Regular meetings: Nobody likes meetings but I think meetings are important for getting things done.
  • Volunteer hour dashboard: our current system of giving volunteer hours is quite messy and informal. Establishing a volunteer dashboard and also providing a “hall of fame” for volunteers or something might be useful? idk.
  • Sponsors: We have 501(c)3, we should be able to get sponsors pretty easily but we haven’t ever gotten around to it. If sponsors can give us cool stuff or give us lots of cash, that would be slick.

In general: I think CPI proved that classes / outreach / clubs / contests are things that 1) we can do and 2) people are looking for. However, in comparison to the USACO Guide, all the other projects of CPI still have a lot of room for growth. We should aim to make all of these projects as well-known and as high-quality as the USACO Guide.

Unfortunately, I don’t think I will be able to lead the CPI through these changes, due to a combination of excessive partying and college applications. It will be up to this year’s executive team to carry this vision forward!

Most of Core (including myself) will still be around to offer advice and answer questions. Finally, to provide stability across changing executive teams, (some of) Core (including myself) will essentially act as “board members” a level above the executive team. Not all Lead Technical Advisors will be board members. There have never been any major conflicts in the past, and I don’t anticipate there being any major conflicts in the future either, so this shouldn’t be much of a concern. Major directional decisions, spending money, etc should all be run by the board members first. Board members and executive team should meet somewhat regularly.

Cheers,
Nathan Wang

View on GitHub