Recently, Moscow Fall Workshops has taken place (it ended about one week ago), and I wanted to address some issues that came into my mind during that period. As you might notice, it took me some time to build the courage and get in the right mindset to write about this.
First of all, I want to say that I am a huge supporter of programming camps and, in general, initiatives to enhance the joy of doing competitive programming and I respect the efforts of building communities around CP. I have always had a kind of excitement when thinking about participating in programming camps (Petrozavodsk, Moscow Workshops, etc.) and their “hardcore” style with lots of contests. I therefore appreciate the immense efforts of organizers, problem setters, and testers, when preparing this camp.
Main point
Coming towards the main point of the blog, I felt that the last programming camp was a bit… underwhelming. Moreover, I’m having a hard time trying to justify the costs of doing such a camp, given the participation fees. For some quick overview, there were 87 Div1 + Div2 teams participating in the contest, and the participation fees were varying from 30000 rubles (approx. $400) for EA/EU participants to $480 for other participants. Some discounts are applicable, but let’s say for the sake of it that the average price for a participation was $400. This comes to a total of around $35000. I’m not including sponsors here (e.g. Yandex), mainly because I’m not sure if they contributed with money and what not, but this would be a good enough (albeit underestimated) budget for the camp.
Let’s get more technical
Let’s analyze possible costs of doing such a programming camp.
Accommodation & Extra activities
This should not apply, as this edition was held remotely.
Problem setting
Problem-setting is another part of the story. It is well known that making a good problem set is very time consuming and involves a lot of hard work. However, after having the surprise of recalling an already-solved problem during one of the contests, I did some quick research and found that most of the contests consisted in problems that were taken from past contests (e.g. Seoul Regional 2020, Shanghai 2004, as well as several problems from the japanese AIZU Online Judge). Amongst the ones that were not taken from other sources, one day was an Opencup contest, and the others are probably going to make for a future Opencup contest.
This essentially means that problems shouldn't require much work to be prepared. There is, nonetheless, still some work to be done in order to find the right problems, port them to the different judging system, rephrase statements. However, going back to the main point: does this explain the budget?
It’s very important to emphasize the fact that I have nothing against making problem sets from past contests; I think it’s highly educational and efficient. However, I simply can’t ignore the fact that this camp had a budget of about $35K.
Editorials & Analysis
I don’t want to say too much about editorials. I think they were pretty well written. I don’t think were the most insightful, and often they were very short, but some may appreciate their conciseness. The video analyses on the other hand, were not the greatest quality, and more often than not they were rushed in the interest of time. I’m curios about opinions from other participants, but I felt that the analysis did not provide much more on top of the editorials.
Contest platform
The contest platform might impose extra costs, because servers have to be kept up and running for a premium contest. Oh no, I think I’ve just opened Pandora’s box! Aaargh!
The contest system was bad, there's no doubt about it. A lot of the times there were no standings, a lot of the times the standings shown on the platform were from 2 hours before the current time. On top of that, I remember on one of the days the system wasn’t evaluating any submissions in queue for the first 30 minutes of a contest (and the chat suggested that it had been down even before we started), which made me essentially want to just skip the day.
Of course, this would be very much understandable, except for the fact that the exact same problems happened in the previous camp. Participants suggested using other platforms like Codeforces last time; I understand that it makes sense to use the Yandex platform because sponsors & what not, but at least make it work.
Div 2
What about Div2? I’m not too sure about how the Div2 experience was felt (maybe you could help me with this); however, I couldn’t help but notice the fact that the lessons and contests prepared for Div2 were, more or less, identical to the ones in the Moscow Pre-Finals Workshop last year. I’m not sure if Div2 participants were aware of this fact before signing up, but I’d certainly not want to experience the surprise of having participated in the last workshop, and realizing that I’m just finding the same lessons and problem sets. Again, please take this information with a grain of salt, as I haven’t participated in Div2, and just took a couple of glances over the materials.
Happy thoughts
On a positive note, I think that this camp (and last ones) had one pretty awesome thing: the Telegram chat. In my past participation in programming camps, I felt that I could have benefited a lot from interacting more with the participants, sharing ideas, or even doing some basic chit-chat. In this sense, I think the recent system comes much closer to that goal, and I actually felt a lot more of the “community” aspect of CP. I think this relates to the fact that, due to the “permanent” nature of chats, it’s easy to record and recall conversations and ideas.
Conclusion
I don’t think the last programming camp was bad. I think there is room for improvement, but the overall experience was okay. However, I do think that the camp was overpriced, and I’m having a hard time reasoning about where this budget is spent. The main reason why I’ve made this blog post is partly to try to understand the situation, and partly to open up to the community about this. My intention is not to hate on people who make these events happen, but rather to try to figure out what proportion of these camps are genuine interest in making the CP community more engaged and improve people’s skills, and what proportion is financial interest.
Did I miss anything? I would very much appreciate to hear about your opinion, and I'm certainly open (and hoping) to change my mind about this.
Thanks for bringing it up! I agree with your points, and frankly I think you wasn't harsh enough. Recently for me and for almost every ICPC participant I know Moscow Workshop became some kind of joke. Quality/price ratio is just f*cked up (There is example of PTZ camp with with much better contests and much less amount of standing crushes). If it was my money, I'd prefer not to participate, nothing to lose here. And I think reason people still going to this camp is cause in most cases universities are paying for them.
I was a participant of many Moscow Workshops Div 2 (DivB) and Div 1(DivA) training camps: Grodno — Summer 2018 and 2019, Dolgoprudny — autumn 2018 and 2019, remote (online) — spring and autumn 2020. As a member of one of my university teams (three teams — 2 at DivA, 1 — DivB) I also had the opportunity to observe what Div2 (DivB) topics had been taught for a long period of time. For example, I noticed that no less than two times (three times as I remember) the same lectures and problemset was given for "Flows" topic. And yes, bicsi is right — Div2 participants were NOT aware of this fact before signing up. This can be seen as direct disrespect for the participants.
The worst happened on last Moscow International Workshop 2020 that was held at September. All the participants got their schedule at about 4 AM a few hours before the first contest)))) It was blatant disrespect.
I am not even talking about constant delays, lags, errors during the contests. Camps do not go without it, it is feature of MW, I believe.
During the training camp in Grodno, I experienced life with cockroaches, terrible food, after which my stomach ached, lack of Internet and transport to the venue of the contests. And no solutions to these problems were presented. No training camp gave my such a "beautiful" experience.
It is absolutely not worth the money and I think that such camps should cease to exist, they humiliate the participants. I am absolutely sure that huge number of participants agree with me.
Absolutely agree, same experience
This might be off-topic, but I want to raise a related question: when the camp uses past contests, does the organizer get permission from the authors?
Sometimes Snark asks me something like "I'm having trouble translating this problem" or "Do you have model solutions for this?". I answered them because sharing the local Japanese problems would be nice... but wait, you earn money with these problems?
I believe it's necessary to get permission from the authors. However, I know an example case where the authors don't know their problems are used in the camp. To be more precise, I forwarded Snark's message to the authors, and then they didn't respond. OK, it's up to them, but later their problems appeared in a camp somehow.
What do you think about this? I want to hear especially from those who write problems. (Of course, participant's POV is also welcome)
I think needing permission from problem setters is kind of silly. Almost no competition stem camps like math contests for example do this, at least as far as I'm aware. Once problems are published in contest, especially if contest problems are public online somewhere, I think anyone should be allowed to share and use them. It would also be very tedious to collect permission from every problem setter if camp includes multiple problem sets and contests, and I can't imagine one saying "no" to allowing more to view their problem.
I am not a problem setter however, and perhaps from their perspective it feels more like stealing one's personal idea they created, but to me problems are just abstract ideas that once people know of should not necessarily need to be connected to the author anymore, though, especially if it is a novel technique, giving author recognition would be nice.
I disagree. Using problems without asking for permission is silly. Especially using them on your event/system without crediting original authors.
In general, I believe that all the problems should have explicit licenses. We use this one in Polish Junior Olympiad in Informatics. You are allowed to use our problems for non-commercial purposes as long as you give us a credit. That seems fair for most educational cases.
How exactly do you prove intent with that license?
Someone could easily say they didn't know that they were using the past problems, and proposed something similar to some site like Codeforces or Codechef and gotten paid. It seems impossible to prove (unless they submitted code to the problem in the past.)
We are mostly protecting materials related to problems, i.e. statements, tests, solutions, and so on. It is hard to copyright an idea.
but to me problems are just abstract ideas that once people know of should not necessarily need to be connected to the author anymore
It is hard to copyright an idea.
This is what I was trying to say by this sentence. The idea is the majority of the problem, "statements, tests, solutions, and so on" could be changed but it would still be basically the same. And while your license is fair imo and is mostly just hoping to promote author credit, which I think is good, in general if someone did not want to follow license permissions for whatever reason, it'd just be a matter of a bit of inconvenience for changing the fore-mentioned other parts of the problem.
Also, there is so many small variations made on a general idea that it would be hard to tell how different a problem has to be for it to be unique vs needing permission from author. While once again, I think giving author permission when seems appropriate is great, it seems there are so many cases where having a license would usually be essentially useless. However, I can get on board of idea of license if problem is thought to include a truly unique and generalized idea that could then be used in other problems, like "aliens" (tho ofc wqs idea was known in china too so...).
Lots of inconvenience, actually. Rewriting all tests, solutions and statement from scratch is hella work. When creating a new problem, crafting an idea is hard, but actually transforming it into a ready-to-test problem is 90% of the time spent.
Of course, it is your right to have this.
However, and please notify me if I am mistaken here, a lot of high-school camps and such are organized in a borderline commercial fashion. In the sense -- some participants pay for the education, the lecturers are compensated, but the whole thing is nonprofit.
Can you clarify whether you intended this to run afoul of your terms?
I've never asked for permission to use a problem. I'm so silly.
That's a very hard situation. Of course, it would be nice to ask permission and even pay to authors for their problems. But we have this community that is used to getting problems for free on the one hand, and getting help with their projects for free just for the sake of "helping to community" on the other hand. And this is kind of related. We are already programmed to expect new high-quality contests/problems for free as participants, so when we are asked to help produce such content we usually agree. Like, I would never reject a request to test a cf round, for example, though in normal world this should be paid. So we all are kinda living in this perpetual state of "I'm trying to repay the community!" even though money was invented, I did not dream it, right?
Suppose the problem is in open access. How bad is it to give a link to it? To add it to a virtual contest through vjudge? To add it to a contest on your own system by downloading test data or generating it yourself? To do all that and also rewrite the statement and erase all traces of the fact that someone else created that problem?
I am now making money through creating a lists of problems I would recommend to solve and making analysis for them. I don't even question my rights to charge money for that. I have certainly did some work and people see the point in paying for that. But I get that from standpoint of author of the problems this might seem outrageous. Even though problems are in open access. What is your opinion?
Let me clarify my thoughts.
I don't find it wrong as long as you give credit. I also suspect the crucial part of your lecture is NOT a problem itself; students cannot find suitable problems for them, so you give them appropriate ones and explain the solutions. Am I correct?
Now let's go back to the camp. I think the camp's main value is the contest itself, and that's why I believe porting past problems without credit doesn't sound right. Yes, they spend time compiling problems and provide original video analysis, but that doesn't justify everything.
I also want to say that I'm very fond of Opencup contests, and I'm happy to help them. In fact, I submitted one contest for free, and I'm considering making another set. (When I participated in camps, I even thought the camp's high price was some donation.) I believe lots of people think in the same way and thus we can see nice Opencup contests. However, we should not take such voluntary works for granted. We should be grateful to the authors and never be like, "nobody would say NO, so let's use their problems."
Does this answer your question?
What credit is enough? If I just give links to the original problem on original platform, is it credit enough? There is no mentioning of author of original problem on problem page itself (on AtCoder), though you can go to the main page of the contest and see who were the authors. But I suspect no one will do it if they already have a link to the problem.
I mean... yeah, but it is kinda hard to distinguish where the problem analysis ends and where general theory starts. Really beautiful problems are rare things, and such problems kinda are a big part of what I do, and I would like to thank authors however I can.
That what I was talking about. We are getting this awesome free stuff and we are so used to it. But we also want to repay for it with our own great stuff. I have similar feelings. Instead of making SRMs for money I prefer honing my problems for Ptz contests which has basically no compensation. I just want to share good things with the community. And that's how most of things are run in cp. All platforms work free of charge which is insane. People just ask each other for help with testing. It is wholesome but... is it the right way to run things? People are spending their energy and time to provide services, why do we think that it is just ok to accept such services?
Having the link to the original problem seems fine to me, though mentioning authors would be great.
That's a difficult question, but I love the current environment where we can enjoy tons of contests free of charge. I'm not a businessman, so I can't predict whether this incredible system is sustainable, but I wish it lasts forever.
I agree. Most universities can afford to spend hundreds of dollars and organizers know about it so they organize expensive camps. One should expect that the price will be related to the quality of these camps, but the reality is different.
First of all, I want to thank you for speaking about this issue out loud. I were much agree that the camp is way overpriced, and that's the reason I had not participated this year.
Why do people still pay:
1. (I think that) most of the time its universities/sponsors who pay, not actual participants. And they have much more money to not actually care about is it overpriced or not. They just don't know the market. There is an official invite with price written. They don't ask "Is it money well spent? Can we spend it better?", they ask "Will it be beneficial for our teams?". And the answer is "Yes, it will be beneficial". And they give the money, because why not. Even if university want to spend money better, they can't because you can't just take money from the budget and pay for coaches or something. And here MW gives an opportunity to officially take money from the budget and spend it on your team, so they do it.
2. The market is pretty much empty, so they can afford having exorbitant prices and people will still pay. It is not a question of "should we choose this camp or that one?", it is more of "are there any more camps we can send our team to, so they have good training?".
Having said that... I can offer some explanations on prices. They might not be correct or even close to truth. I am not a part of MW team and I did not organize any other camps. But I did (and still do) try to do some online group tutoring, in some regards even close to MW, albeit on a smaller scale. I will try to make parallels with my summer intensive program, as it is closer to MW. So here are my thoughts:
1. Your estimation on total sum is a bit unfair to MW. It is correctly calculated, but they did not know how much teams will participate in advance, did they? But they have to fix a price in advance, and they probably want to set it such that they will make money, even in the worst case. And most of the work regarding the workshop has to be done regardless of number of teams. It is hard. Let's look at my example. I decided that I want to make ~100k rubles from my program, as it will be fair salary for my work. But then cost depends on number of participants I don't know in advance. So instead I thought what would be a fair cost for one participant and just hoped that I'll get enough participants to get the salary I thought I deserved. But that's bad from business point of view, and MW is first and foremost a business.
2. They have a big team. From standpoint of a participant all that camp needs are contests and editorials, so we can justify paying (even big money) to people who prepares (or chooses problems for) contests and makes editorials, let's call them Snark and Endagorion (any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental), and we are outraged when the budget looks like it should be 10 times lower for paying just two people. But they actually has more than two people. Remember about making official letters for universities? You need lawyers and accountants for that. I'm sure they have dedicated PR team, judging by how obnoxious and in-your-face their advertising are. You need volunteers (I don't think that they are unpaid), even if they can't really bring print-outs to right teams in reasonable time. You need person to coordinate volunteers. Now you have a big team and you need management to coordinate all of them. And you have to pay all of them. I actually would be very happy to have a dedicated person to manage payments, uploads of problems, uploads of video analysis on YouTube, talking to people interested in joining my lessons, writing announcements and advertising etc. None of that is relating to cp actually, but that's a big part of things that I have to do on weekly basis. But if I will hire such a person I'll have to pay them, and that will inevitably take a toll on costs of my lessons.
3. I think that MW actively trying to get bigger and wider, and I would not be surprised if camps in new locations are cheaper and maybe have less participants, but they still have to spend the same amount of money on them. So they might try to recover their losses on well-established camp with big user base.
Thank you for the comprehensive reply! It makes sense to adjust the prices given that you don't know participants in advance. I think it's reasonable to make some guesses and extrapolate from past editions, though (which had similar number of teams).
However, I'm not sure exactly how the big team comes into play into this special situation where the camp is being held remotely. Where, exactly, is the need for volunteering work (apart from the mentioned points)? I feel that much of the workforce that you mentioned was not needed (and probably not used) in this situation, as we've only come in contact with a handful of people. I agree that in an on-site scenario, this would yield significant costs, though.
About the university letters, I can't say much, as we found out about this camp through our personal e-mails.
ACPC organizers feels proud of this camp's organizers.
My team started participating in the camps after a good result in the previous SEERC. Our university supported us after regional, we participated in the last three Moscow Workshops and ByteDance — we chose some tasks from our national competitions (mostly our tasks) and merge them into one problemset.
I think the camps help us a lot in preparation and all of us like them. We are all from different cities, but we decided to work in one place to simulate real competition as much as we can. Seven days with amazing teams and effort like real regional/final are very valuable for us — more than doing some arbitrary virtual contest.
My team organized some quarantine competitions for Serbia students (for free of course). I asked Snark for using some tasks from the camp and he agreed and even sent me test cases and model solutions. Another important thing, Opencups, and Opentrains are very helpful for big amount of students. I see them more serious than any CodeForces/CodeChef/AtCoder competitions. Now, missing codeforces round became a habit for me, but missing Opencup — no way. So, I am thankful for all of that and I think it has a big big impact on the whole community!
I am not sure where did you find 120 teams, mixed contests had 87 teams, right?
Now, I will go to some things that I do not like.
I must be honest and say that I am thankful coronavirus that I haven't had to go two more times in Dolgoprudny on live camp.
I think the conditions are not proportional to the money given by participants. Food is really bad. We had meals in the canteen — it must be very cheap and they do not spend more than 30-40 dollars for 7 days for all food per participant. I eat in student restaurants in my country for years, but the quality of food is much better and there is no same meal for all 7 days (and the price of one meal is 0.5$). Once I got up for the breakfast and there were porridge and one egg. I decided to skip the rest of the breakfasts — 15 minutes of sleep is more valuable than one egg. Once I took a muffin for the lunch (as cake), the woman working in the canteen yelled at me (in Russian of course) at it was stressful for me as I didn't know what is the problem. And problem was that I need to pay an additional 0.2$ for the muffin ?! Most participants were eating in 2-3 fast-food restaurants around the university. I think that event with so many amazing coders (who paid for it) must be much better. The first few days I was thinking about food more than about problems during the competition. I think it's an underestimation of the quality of the people who came and who can be somewhere else at the moment and earn a lot of money. Nobody waited for us at the airport or we had precise instructions where we need to come. The accommodation wasn't so good too. Internet was really bad. It was written we are in the room with some guy Dos Santos and we were waiting for him 7 days with stress we need to sleep in the room with arbitrary guy :) We had never met him, maybe he is a cool guy. Overall, I think accommodation and food are very cheap and they are earning even more money when camp is live. Volunteers are great and did not prefer to communicate with them a lot, but I am thankful for every help.
You mentioned most of the things about tasks and the price for the tasks. I wouldn't go into more details about that price. I do not think it is so expensive when you look per team, but when you sum up all the money it is very very expensive. For me, it is most important to have interesting tasks (most of them are unknown to me, as I am not practicing a lot of a big amount of online judges). But when I see the title Worldwide Selection contest X, first my thought is: I could sleep a few more hours. Tasks with parsing inputs and running optimized recursion with 150 lines of code and pure texts in my opinion worth a negative amount of money. I am not sure why they are choosing such tasks.
One more thing, when we were organizing our competition on ByteDance, we expected some quality control, some reviewers, testers, and so on. One day we get up for the competition (as we thought our competition will be in 1-2 days) and we just saw our tasks.
I do not think the price is the biggest problem, as we have already concluded most of us are not paying from our pocket. But for that price we can get more for sure and I think the quality would increase significantly if someone review the competitions and they mention free participation for problemsetters.
I totally agree with your positive (and some of the negative) facts. That's why I felt the need to include all the disclaimers in the blog. I took the information about 120 teams from the number of accounts registered on upsolving (Yandex platform only shows top 50 participants in the standings), but looking at the final standings I agree with you.
I think the price might not make such a difference to most participants, but might make for some. For example, in our case, it is uncommon for the Romanian teams to ask for sponsorship from our university (we either find third-party sponsors like companies or NGOs to cover the costs, or we just pay it out from our own pockets; the latter was the case for our last 2 programming camps, as far as I remember).
However, even if universities were paying for all the participating teams, I'm not sure if it's a good enough reason to "let it be", especially when a lot of the costs don't seem to add up.
Thanks for the awesome contests, btw :).
I remember getting yelled at in Russian too, by a janitor (?) that was in our room one day. For some reason I could never successfully explain that I can't understand what they are going on about. I was surprised that they even had a janitor, it would make more sense to just clean after the camp (or even force us to clean after the camp).
I wish they didn't offer accommodation, that way I could have asked the university for a hotel room :P.
You must know there are Petrozavodsk camps, which have more contests and are cheaper.
I don't know about COVID prices, and will take 2019 prices because they are known to me:
Petrozavodsk:
Moscow:
So the average cost per contest is like 1.3 times cheaper in Petrozavodsk camps. If you travel from abroad, this ratio is a bit lower, but not very much.
Still there are some advantages of Moscow camp:
Just take part in whatever you feel more profitable for you and market will do its job: Moscow camps will become cheaper (or Petrozavodsk camps will become more expensive, lol)
The COVID prices are published online.
Petrozavodsk [link]:
Moscow [link]:
And that's early registration fee for MW, and a regular fee for ptz, as well as in your calculations. Paid on the spot price at MW 2019 was 38500 RUB [link].
Hello everyone,
First of all, we want to say thanks to bicsi for bringing up the topic and giving detailed feedback. We are open to critics and will use it for the benefit of the MW camps, its participants and CP community.
About the division B program. At every Workshop (it is about Moscow camps — Moscow Pre-Finals Workshop, Moscow International Workshop) we use the same action plan for the list of the topics for thematic contests. We send a thematic questionnaire to the teams who made the payment, collect their answers, check the questionnaire answers and history of participation for each team in div. B. Then we set the list of the topics (topics can coincide with the topics of previous camps but if participants are different it's fine). Now we understand that this scheme can embarrass participants: they see the list of topics, they don't like it, but they have already made the payment. We discussed this situation inside our team and decided to try another plan next time. We will set the list of topics beforehand and teams will be able to check it before making the payment. This option can be less adjustable to the needs of the teams, but it allows to avoid the situation when the team made the payment but don't like topics.
About Division A problem setting. We got your opinions about the problems and we know the issue. We will try to keep a better balance in future.
We want to remind everyone that we still welcome teams who want to give a contest for the Workshop. We will provide free of charge participation for them. Also before each online Workshop, we intend to continue to hold contests where teams can win discounts (OpenCup championship and separate contests) and give discounts for World finalists.
Concluding our message we want to thank everyone who shared their opinion about Moscow Workshop and how the community in general works. It is very helpful for us. We will work on improving the quality of our camps.
On one hand, I agree that some MW contests are poorly prepared. Statements, checker, tests, solutions are sometimes wrong. Mixed contests feature old problems that sometimes end up being known. And they are usually not high quality. I think the pandemic also resulted in the decreased quality which is apparently not reflected in pricing. So yes: I think it may not meet the professional standards, and having more thorough time and effort to preparation will make a much better experience.
On other hand, I feel that some criticisms are unfair:
"I don't know why budgets are mentioned at all. If organizers can profit then they should." — I disagree with this statement. Or, more specifically, I disagree with the fact that you consider it "unfair" to take this into account. While I agree that seeing a programming camp as a means to earn some money would draw more people into making an effort to make this experience better, I think the opposite might happen; i.e., organizing a camp for the sake of earning that revenue, even though the quality of the content might be compromised. In general, I think it's totally fair to have some awareness about how the money is being spent.
"PtzCamp makes every other camp look bad" — That's kind of fair, but the difference between the two prices (1666 RUB vs 30000 RUB) is much more significant (is this the actual price? wow). And, if what you're saying is true, then I think it makes even more sense to put into balance the budget difference vs quality.
"High-quality, original problemsets should be shared in Opencup" — Of course, I'm happy and grateful for that. However, in this case, the camp should provide other quality aspects to justify participating.
"the only reasonable way to (make camps feel less overpriced) is to hide high-quality Camp materials from OpenCup" — No, it's not; judging by their own price on a problem set, their fair value for preparing problems for a camp equals the participation fee of 7 out of 87 teams (even less, considering my post). It's hard for me to imagine that non-participants that propose problem sets get 5 times that amount. Of course, there are other costs involved into organizing a camp like this, but it seems that problem setting is hardly "breaking budget". Quite the opposite, I think that problem setting is underpriced, compared to the budget.
To conclude, while I understand your points, I think that most of the things you've written can be summarized into "their budget is their business" and "I'd pay this money, therefore it's good". I respect those opinions. My opinion is that educational initiatives should be more focused on the goals and less on the amount of money that can be siphoned out of them. But again, it's a capitalist world, so I guess this reasoning works as well :).
And why should MW and Maleev personally profit from OpenCups? You are saying it like it is better to use some weird schemes to support free good things. MONEY IS A REAL THING. WE CAN PAY FOR SERVICES WE USE WITH MONEY.
MW is bad and overpriced, but we should support Snark and OpenCup, so that's fine — that's what you are saying. It is insane, isn't it? I think that Snark should at least accept donations for OpenCup. Even better would be to take money for participation and to pay authors from it.
Because if it was free we couldn't complain. It is not only about quality being low (and it is low), but also about quality/cost being waaaay too low.
I am. It is not that hard. Just don't waste money on things that don't benefit participants (like fucking PR). And generally don't take too much for yourself. 15000 RUB per one participant is not that low actually. Let's say that 5000 RUB of that goes for food. 10000 RUB * 50 teams * 3 teammates = 1.5kk RUB. That would be enough to pay 100k for each contest, 200k to Snark and 100k to 4 more people, I think that ptz organizing team is small and that's actually good. Oh, also they do not pay to authors of contests, 15k for analysis only. Of course there is an issue of location (like, I could not make a camp because I'll have to rent something and that will be too costly) but they are (as well as MW) using university so that should not be a big problem.
Yeah, Ptz is awesome and cheap. But not unreasonably cheap. They just don't get a large profit from it. MW is unreasonably expensive.
Do not compare South Korean prices with Russian prices.
Seriously, who wants to hold it when they do an enormous amount of work and yet don't take much for themselves? Is it ok that we don't pay cause "they enjoy anyway and will work with little budgets?". People doing CP have alternatives: They can do internships, or do some private lectures.
Also, things will get much complicated if you work onsite. Using university is not free. Otherwise, everyone will gonna use it, right? Someone is paying somewhere for that place. It's not an obvious thing. Otherwise, they would have competitors.
Yeah cuz they do a lot of work with small hands. I agree..
Wdym? It's similar with Moscow prices.
Obviously I don't say do it for free. I say pay yourself a reasonable fee. 100k is a good money for two weeks of hard work (of course they spend more than two weeks cause you have to prepare things for the camp, but I don't think it is equally intense or significantly more). So in my calculations I have not omitted organizers fee, I just assumed they should not make millions. I actually think that they earn even less than I assumed, but I can't verify it either way.
What I did omit is taxes. I have also omit sponsor money. I can not estimate both of those things, sorry.
Idk. I always treated petrozavodsk camp as a community effort. This assumption makes the things reasonable. The contests are made by participating teams, coaches, unis. Made for free. Because we want to keep the camp running. Yeah, there is an organizing team, they do a hard work, they do it great. And they rightfully get some compensation for that.
Even Snark fits in this model. Asking people from other regions to help our community effort by sharing their contests, and share our contests to help with smth similar in other regions. I guess that sounds fair (honestly — I have no idea how Snark doing that, there might be some misbehavior in details).
And the very important part is that nobody tries to make money on this. It will ruin the whole idea. Cause many people work for free or heavily underpaid to make this camp happen.
And here comes the MW. For me it feals like the they wanna merge the best of two approaches. Make business and get a fair salary for they work. While using the community effort wherever they can.
Yeah, I think it is a combination of good tradition, and the existence of people who dedicated themselves to keep it. I think our IOI camps are in a similar situation (pays and workloads better or worse in different aspects). People in camps are highly dedicated, plus they didn't graduate the university and did not undergone any interns or stuff :)
I often discussed replicating such culture to ICPC camps. In every conclusion, it simply looked insurmountable, even if we assume that we don't create original problemsets.
I disagree in general case. Maybe it's true that MW need less PR and more "benefit for participants", but I don't know anything about them.
In general, you need good participants, good coaches, good authors and good organizers. No public relations and no information => very little traction and your choice of staff is very limited. Word of mouth can only get you so far.
If we believe that MW-scale camp with good quality is possible, then I'm certain it needs systematic PR in order to be sustainable. It may be limited by "posting regularly on CF, having a good website, watching for posts like this one", but it's PR nevertheless.
CP market is flooded by guys who aren't trying to make money from it, or at least it's not their main income source (at the moment or in life). So there is no point to discuss how reasonable cost/benefit in particular cases (however, there are some to disccuss cost/benefit itself)
Merket economy isn't a real thing in communist society.
I believe both looking for more ways to earn money and open disscussion about it should make things better for everyone.