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Visiting at Home
How often do you judge (or play) a tournament outside of your own major metropolitan area?

Though the numbered judge levels still exist, the addition of labels that indicate larger and larger regions as judges advance in level suggests that for the vast majority of judges (and players), the answer is "scarcely", if not "never". This is not surprising, nor is it explicitly problematic, but one of the biggest factors behind why more experienced judges are valuable and effective is that they do get out and judge outside their own communities and around the world, a practice encouraged by the DCI.

The obvious reason this is useful is in terms of what those judges are able to learn from others and what they're able to teach in turn, taking innovations and ideas that might otherwise be isolated to one particular city and spreading them throughout the DCI. Many great ideas have spread from one area to tournaments around the DCI by virtue of judges comparing notes at professional events.

There is, however, a more subtle influence to judging outside one's home community that can play just as big of a role—not just what you learn from other judges and other tournaments, but also how you treat those other judges and other tournaments. The impact of the "how" factor can be easy to miss if you don't think carefully about it, but it's important enough that it's worth thinking about.

Status Quo
Judges move on, and new judges get introduced to the program, but the core of any judging community generally stays very similar month after month, with change only happening over the long term. Overall, this is a good — lends stability, consistency, and reliability to the way that tournaments are run and gives judges and players alike a good set of expectations to work with, tournament after tournament. The flip side of this, though, is the potential for stagnancy—to assume that things always have to be a certain way, that people always act in a certain manner, and that things can't ever change. Efficiency and consistency can lie in the way of growth and improvement.

Think about the judges that regularly judge at your events. Do you know which ones are best at logistics, or player interaction, or rules questions? Do you know who you can count on to make sure something gets done as quickly as possible, or to make sure that something you mention early in the day gets remembered by the end of the tournament? Who isn't experienced enough to handle a delicate play situation on their own, or who might need to be kept off the microphone because of a lack of enunciation? Which judge is going to still be going strong at the end of the day and which ones need to have regular breaks?

Most regular judges probably have immediate answers for these and many other similar questions, and usually for good reasons—past observations, past performance, and how things have always gone in the past. For the running of an effective tournament, these observations can be crucial, assigning the right people to the right jobs and making sure you don't end up with somebody out of their depth. But preconceptions like this can also affect the way that you interpret and evaluate somebody's actions, and it's easy to let these characterizations turn into blind ruts.

On the Road
Now consider your thought process when you judge outside of your usual tournament area, whether that's at a professional event with judges from around the world, or whether it's guest judging in another established reason. Do you approach the tournament and the other staff differently because you don't know much in advance about everyone's strengths, weaknesses, and style?

It can be uncomfortable working with a new group of people, particularly if the group all knows each other and you're a newcomer. It can be challenging to fit in, to know when certain things are expected to happen, and to execute as efficiently as in a group that you're familiar with. On the flip side, however, this also forces you to look at things without your usual preconceptions, to contemplate new ways of doing things, and perhaps most importantly, to give everyone a fair chance to show their skills and areas for improvement through their actions that day rather than through their reputations or history.

With the amount of new data to process and not having history to work with, however, it can be difficult to process everything and come up with fully accurate judgments. A single tournament can suffer from sample size issues (sometimes people have a bad day or a particularly good day), and having to evaluate everyone from scratch can be overwhelming and lead to inaccuracies. Ideal understanding of other judges involves a balance between considering them from scratch and working with external data and existing frameworks.

Fresh Eyes
Putting some thought into treating your home tournament environment as you would a guest judging stint can help to achieve more of this balance without having to leave your area. Here are some concrete ways where this way of thinking might be helpful:

Reconsider the Givens: In your local tournaments, the way things are done can often become so ingrained that they become a given—they don't get thought about, analyzed, or challenged, because they're just the way that things are done. This isn't as likely to happen in the case of judging in a new area, where the way things are done will be different and you're more likely to engage in discussions about why things are done that way. This thinking and these discussions are valuable, and worth engaging in from time to time even in your home community, to make sure that you aren't missing opportunities to improved your procedures.

Shuffle the Ranks: Do the same judges always perform exactly the same tasks, every single tournament? This is a great way to hinder growth opportunities and to prevent people from learning new skills. When you get put in a position of leading other judges that aren't the ones you're familiar with, one thing that will happen is that you'll have to somewhat randomly assign jobs to people, and this can be a useful thing to do in familiar tournaments as well. Certainly, if you're putting somebody into a position they've been challenged by before, it's important to keep an eye out and make sure that things are covered if they don't go well, but it's hard for people to show improvement if they're never given a chance.

Solicit Other Opinions: When you're working with a brand new group of judges, especially in the case that they're familiar with each other and you aren't, you'll find yourself spending a lot more time than usual gathering data from other judges, and what they know of themselves and of each other. This is worth doing even in your own community—everyone has their own perspectives and has a unique view on how things are, and the more of this data you're able to gather, the better picture you'll have on everyone's performance and the overall effectiveness of your tournaments.

Take a Myopic View: When you haven't worked with people in the past, your evaluation of them necessarily is limited to what you observe in that single tournament (hopefully informed by, but not unduly influenced by, the opinions of others). While this may be a less solid judgment than you might be able to make over the course of a number of tournaments, it also can be useful for people to receive feedback that is directly and completely correlated to their most recent performance. Feedback over the long term can be harder to digest than feedback on one's most recent activities. So while it's important to work with people with long-term improvement in mind, taking a more myopic view from time to time and giving specific feedback about a single event can help people gain clearer focus on where they stand.

A Familiar Take
There's also benefit to be had in bringing some of the methodologies that you apply to your home tournaments with you when you go on the road:

Trust Your Methods: The way that you do things have probably developed that way for a reason and you should be ready to trust those methods. This means being willing to advance them as ideas for other people to consider, explaining their value, and figuring out how to improve everybody's understanding of how to do things through discussion and debate. It's important not to dictate your way over everyone else's, but simply following other people's ideas without thinking about them or speaking up when you disagree deprives everyone of the chance to improve.