Nearly a year ago, I wrote an article criticizing congress docket group chats as harmful. They still are ineffective, toxic, and exclusionary. However, in the meantime, competitors and tournaments alike have become more conscious of their presence and consequences. This article will set out to offer a more nuanced perspective on docket group chats, why they form, why they're harmful, and what both competitors and tournaments can do to limit their influence.

First of all, let's review: what is a congress docket group chat? Often, multiple debaters attending a major congressional debate tournament will create a group chat to discuss the order in which the bills should be debated. Debaters intend to make this group chat as large as possible to maximize the number of participants who may agree with the docket proposed in the group chat. Although it's a rough process that never results in complete agreement, these group chats usually come to some sort of consensus on which bills should and shouldn't be debated. For example, for Sunvite 2024 just two weeks ago, one competitor started a group chat to go through this process. At its largest the chat included nearly 100 competitors in the pool, more than half of the 152 entries in congress. After extensive discussion, disagreement, and a fair deal of trolling, the group chat administrator prepared this graphic to push the docket preferred by the group chat.

The Why

Before I explain why these are generally harmful, let's take a closer look at why these group chats are created in the first place. We'll stick with Sunvite 2024 as an example: The entire tournament had 31 bills, and the three prelim sessions totaled 20 bills. One prelim session had 9 bills. That's a lot of prep to do on bills you simply might not debate. There were undoubtedly some bills in that third prelim round that weren't debated by a single chamber of the tournament. Assuming that 2 bills are debated in each chamber, each competitor may only debate 6 bills out of the 20 they were expected to prep. This is honestly a massive imposition on the competitors. We have lives outside of debate. We are ambitious students who are likely juggling advanced placement schoolwork, other extracurriculars, and possibly work. Tournaments expecting us to prep out dozens of speeches on policy proposals that we'll never even use is pretty messed up.

That's where a docket group chat may come in handy: to minimize the prep workload, why not just get as many people from the entire congress division in one group chat to agree on a docket in advance? You probably don't know the room pairings in advance, so the only meaningful docket consensus needs to include as much of the tournament as possible. Indeed, these group chats have no real reason to be exclusionary – in fact, the more people join, the more legitimate the consensus becomes. Ideally, the group chat can narrow the docket down to a few favorite bills, allowing the competitors to confidently ignore some bills that no one wants to do. This certainly has its upsides: Miles Bloomfield of Nova High School, FL, writes that "Docket GCs can be absolute hell but when you have a tournament like Sunvite that posts 20 bills for just prelims they're almost necessary because people either can't have that many bills - often due to responsibilities, executive dysfunction issues or lack of technology at home." Ryon Jemail of American Heritage Palm Beach, FL tells me, "congress GCs are often massive and include the majority of the tournament entries, and save incredible amounts of time for people. I'd say this is better for those who are low income and typically don't have access to many tournaments, because it's for those whose time is already stretched thin and all the more valuable." Fair enough. So how inclusive are these GCs in practice? And how often do they even work?

The "Good," The Bad, and The Ugly

Let's break group chats down into three different types (with some overlap).

1. The good: GCs that do their best to include as many people as possible and find a productive docket consensus.

Docket group chats are, by no means, actively malicious! Virtually all of them try to be as inclusive as possible, both when it comes to inviting tournament participants and valuing their opinions when it comes to forming a consensus. This is necessary for the GCs to work as intended in the first place. At their best, this is a good thing. As Ryon and Miles described, this would cut down the need for people to prep absurd legislation packets.

These GCs are inherently magnetic. As a potential bellwether for what will or won't be debated, Camilo Herrera of Olympic Heights High School in FL feels compelled to join these GCs: "As a leader of my team my first responsibility is to do right by them. With this being our first year on the circuit and learning purely by getting burned, I originally believed these group chats would act as a way to even the playing field with our small team even slightly." In fact, I do the same thing. If I know that a large bloc of debaters broadly agree on a certain docket, it would be simply irresponsible not to let my team know. Personally, I abstain from participating in these GCs and benefitting from this, but that's not a decision I can make in good faith for my entire team.

Unfortunately, even the "good" docket GCs come with an inevitable downside. The more inclusive your group chat is, the more severely you exclude those few who aren't in it. Let's break that down: if your GC includes a measly 30% of the tournament pool, it might exert some influence, but it won't have the leverage to set dockets across the entire tournament. Those who weren't in it were certainly excluded, but they're still in the majority of congress debaters likely coming to the tournament with individual preferences and prep. However, what if your GC includes 80% of the pool and ends up with some sort of consensus? It will likely dominate the docket discussion on the day of the tournament. The 20% of the pool who had no idea what was going on will basically have a docket decided for them. In other words, the smaller the scope of the exclusion, the greater the magnitude of the exclusion. Damn, what a Catch 22. 

And that's the best case scenario! What happens if they fail?

2. The bad: GCs that fail to include debaters or find a meaningful consensus, and actively cause harm along the way.

Some saw the Sunvite GC as a failure, not a success. One competitor at Sunvite who wishes to remain anonymous told me "Not only did the constant messaging come to no real conclusion, but also people were having conversations that related to maybe five people on a group chat with upwards of 150 congressional debaters." Five people steering a conversation about a docket that will eventually influence the entire pool of 150 debaters? That can't be good. 

In some ways, competitors may have actually overextended when it comes to alleviating the stressful workload of prep associated with these bid tournaments. Camilo Herrera of Olympic Heights High School in FL believes that "...this is because the group chats have, instead of transferring attention to prepping those bills, made everyone put nearly no work because their work ethic has been harmed. This change in culture is seen with my performance in Prelims, the judges were waiting for anyone to be prepared with a constructive speech, me being the only one earning me 1st in my chamber." Anyone who has done national circuit congress has probably ended up in a debate missing sufficient speakers. Sometimes this happens because the rest of the chamber ends up debating an otherwise unpopular bill pushed by a docket GC. Sometimes this happens because people who felt confident in the docket GC end up having to debate something unexpected. Either way, docket GCs often hold partial responsibility for debaters being unprepared to debate legislation.

3. The ugly: GCs that are used by influential debaters with "clout" to advance their own strategic advantage.

Everyone has something to gain by controlling the discussion or influencing the "consensus" reached by a GC. Well-connected, well-known, respected and successful debaters are in a unique position to initiate or lead the discussion in a way that supports their best interests.

Another (different) competitor dissatisfied with the GC situation at Sunvite told me, "Generally, the people in the chat were established national circuit debaters with strong connections, with very few solo entries or schools that aren't typically known for having strong programs being included. Even then, the entries from those schools were more often than not still left out during the politicking process, acting more as observers than participants, as their opinions are seldom respected as much as those of debaters that have a laundry list of accomplishments from previous major tournaments."

One congressional debater who wished to be known only as Bella believes that these GCs reinforce a culture of unfair exclusionary politicking that may disadvantage debaters who simply don't have the clout: "I did senate at NSDA nats (as someone who mainly does LD), and I noticed that some people in my prelim chamber knew each other from natcirc tournaments and had talked previously before setting the docket. I felt left out of some exclusive group and started to question if they also shared prep on the bills that ended up being selected."

Camilo Herrera of Olympic Heights High School in FL has observed that docket GCs are a unique opportunity for influential debaters to substantially improve their chances of delivering a strategic authorship speech: "Since they have an overwhelming presence in the group chat, everyone submits to their push even though in big tournaments they'd only have one person per chamber, reducing their influence nearly nothing. For that reason, these group chats have become a way to silence and put docket nominations in a place where smaller schools are at a disadvantage."

Too often, these GCs are really just a docket discussion among a handful of active, vocal, and well-connected debaters looking out for their own best interests. People are willing to hear them out simply because having a preset docket to prep is better than having nothing to go off of. That certainly empowers privileged debaters at the expense of those who lack that same degree of influence, and certainly at the expense of debaters who aren't even in the loop.

Now What?

As always, we have to ask ourselves: what's the next step? There is a compelling case that docket group chats still don't work, still exclude debaters from small schools, and still create a toxic & non inclusive competitive culture. There are a few different ways this could be solved:

1. Tournaments use fewer bills.

One of the biggest reasons these docket GCs even exist is because tournaments are happy to make debaters prep bills they'll never debate. There is no real point in this. There is no educational value in giving students more work than they can reasonably do, especially when they'll just try to politic their way out of it. This is an easy fix:

First, tournaments could simply cap the legislation used in each section. Harvard and TOC do this, limiting each session to no more than 3 bills. This is a happy balance - it's a challenging yet fair workload that empowers chambers to avoid their least favorite bills in a session.

Second, tournaments that accept student submissions could limit each school to entering no more than one bill. Sunvite included six bills from a single school - Western. Can you blame them? Not really. If a tournament uses every bill you submit, it's a perfectly fair and strategic choice to flood the tournament with your own school's bills - after all, you'll likely have prior prep on them and will enjoy authorship privilege. It just means the other participants will feel pressured to prep a few more bills they probably won't touch and probably won't ever see again. The easy answer is just limiting each school to a single bill. Tournaments will still have plenty of submissions to round out their dockets. Anything more than that is simply gratuitous.

One anonymous competitor points to Harvard and Emory as a good example of this solution: "Both of them have packets that are voted on by competitors, ensuring everyone has a say in the process. They also have just 3 bills per session, significantly reducing the prep burden and all but eliminating the need for the chat in the first place. Or better yet, the Stanford tournament has just 2 bills per prelim session, meaning politicking is even more meaningless, because every bill is going to be debated anyways."

2. Don't publish entry lists.

Many tournaments publish a full list of competitors attending a tournament by full name and school. Especially if they have even a single mutual friend, this makes it very easy for someone to find other debaters and add them to a docket group chat.

A few tournaments don't do this, including Harvard, Emory, and the NSDA National Championship. These tournaments consistently have far less active or influential docket GCs.

3. Tournament-provided docket discussions.

One of our anonymous competitors who was disillusioned with Sunvite thinks that Princeton poses a promising alternative model: "...a Google Doc that is facilitated by the tournament that allows all competitors to access it by filling out a Google Form."

For example, the 77th Chaminade Invitational in New York used a Google doc accessible to all competitors to facilitate an equitable docket discussion. Did it work? Take a look for yourself. The schools went through a series of docket proposals and self-managed proposals to swap or move bills. That certainly sounds like a way more equitable solution to this problem than student-run docket GCs.

4. Students stop making group chats.

Okay, all the other ideas count on tournaments doing something proactive, responsible, and reasonable. In other words, I'm not counting on any league, tournament, or regulatory body to implement these ideas any time soon.

So my last suggestion is this: Stop making congress docket group chats. Stop respecting the dockets they insist "everyone agrees on." Stop using them. 

"Okay, Nick, that's easy for you to ask." Fine, that's fair. You can wait for Sunvite (and every other tournament) to do something along with me. In the meantime, consider writing them an email about how you feel. Sunvite even had a feedback form for competitors to leave suggestions and recommendations.

Final Notes

This article focused on the docket GC situation at Sunvite, but I think this is a fair analogy to the GCs people systematically make for other congress tournaments. If anything, it was one of the most productive and fair congress docket GCs I have ever seen. Even so, if this many people thought so lowly of it, what does that say about this norm as a whole?

I know that the Equality in Forensics Blog, and I personally, have a predominantly national circuit audience. I have heard countless people defend to me the merits of congress docket GCs. Indeed, the situation is nuanced. I hope I've done my due diligence in breaking that down in this article. But at the risk of sounding corny, please, check your privilege. I have deliberately included the opinions of people on both sides of the issue to highlight the startling difference between how people perceive docket GCs. If you still don't even have a doubt in your mind that these GCs are perfectly fine, ask yourself: Why might my experience not necessarily be the case for someone from a smaller school, a poorer school, or a less successful school? Why might my voice be valued more than the people who feel excluded from these GCs?

As you ask yourself that, please read a few other final quotes from those who consider these GCs exclusionary.

"It’s hard not to be in the group chats. As a leader of my team my first responsibility is to do right by them. With this being our first year on the circuit and learning purely by getting burned, I originally believed these group chats would act as a way to even the playing field with our small team even slightly. This, even though true, is completely outweighed by the other critical flaws in the group chats; the unfair nature of them… in an ideal world the root of the problem is the splits and lack of a starting speech. The best way to fix that is to do what Harvard is doing, prioritize legislation that has their authors in the chamber."
- Camilo Herrera, Olympic Heights High School, FL

"It felt really shady and exclusionary to me—I joked with my team that the natcirc congress mafia was the reason I didn’t break."
- Bella

"How can we as a community, built around an activity of discussion, possibly engage in such a process where some aren’t even invited to speak? For the teams that weren’t invited I feel especially sorry. For some, this could have been one of the only national tournaments they went to this year, or in the case of others, one of the only ones they’ll ever go to in their careers, and one they paid thousands of dollars to go to at that. After all that, simply because of their lack of connections and not being invited to this chat, that experience was ruined. This drives exclusivity in the event and keeps people out of Congress, resulting in a system where those that are privileged enough to “make it in” have inflated chances of succeeding."
- Anonymous

"Coming from a school with a smaller team and being new to debate this year, I did not know very many debaters attending this tournament so this group chat only amplified what I had been told previously- that this event can be an unequal playing field as under the table discussions occur before a tournament which could potentially blind side the aware competitors."
- Anonymous (on Sunvite)