Attention, all Meet Directors!

From Thomson - Privacy: Role of the Organization Concept of privacy - Simply put, privacy is the right to be left alone. If a person has disclosed personal information of a confidential nature to an organization, it must not be disclosed to a third person without the consent of the discloser. Some people may feel that their age (not on your list, but used as an example), gender, club affiliation or even membership in USMS is a matter of personal privacy. And while gender, club affiliation and USMS membership generally fall into the category of ordinary personal data, age and an individuals USMS number could be considered as sensitive data. So we no longer post results from meets either? When you enter a meet, your exact age for the purpose of the meet goes on the psych sheet, heat sheet, and results. At a certain point, agreeing to compete in competition means that you agree to that data being published because it's necessary for the operation of the meet. Some LMSC's (mine included) post information such as your name, registration number, and team affiliation. And if I really wanted to, I could brute force lookup every single permanent ID by going to www.usms.org/.../(permanent_ID), for example www.usms.org/.../023RX for me. I'm sure that would violate the terms of service for the website, but that wouldn't stop someone from doing it, which could get you names, team affiliations, competition history, sexes, and ages. Think about it this way: the meet director is already in a position of trust to begin with because they are operating a meet for an organization granted a sanction or recognition. They have access to all of the registration information for each swimmer in the meet, which is all of the information that's protectable. An unscrupulous meet director could abscond with this information and misuse it. But I don't see many calls to not have the meet director take meet entries. It would overly impede the orderly operation of the meet. I could see a limitation of what information is distributed to meet directors as reasonable, and I could even see a policy on what the meet director can do with this information as reasonable (e.g. information only usable to validate entries, but not allowed for the purpose of harassing people to come to your swim meet). But saying that all of this information is completely private is ignorant of the reality that the meet director already has much of this information. Now I suppose you could also go to a partial USA Swimming model, and require meet directors to submit entries to the LMSC registrar for meet recon a certain amount of time before the meet. It would certainly cut down on the ability to do deck entries, and it would probably add to the workload for the registrars. But it's not a very effective model for USMS. Patrick King

Jeff and Patrick, You appear to be confusing organizational membership with event participation. When a person participates in a sanctioned event they are giving their implicit consent to have certain personal information disclosed in meet programs and results. I’m not sure this same level of implied consent exists when someone joins an organization.

To further clarify what Rob is pointing out... Nobody is arguing that a meet director needs to know the names, teams, and ages for all of the swimmers who are entered into their meet. However, is it reasonable for all meet directory to know all of that information for everybody in the LMSC? If you provide the RE1 file, you provide the information for everyone in the LMSC, whether they ultimately enter your meet or not. Personally, I only use the RE1 file for the purpose of double-checking information already in Meet Manager. (I run the large SCY Championships in New England.) I actually prefer to type the information from an entry form by hand, rather than have it already in the computer. For me, it's a lot faster to just type in the next name and ID number, rather than to search through the list of athletes looking for that particular name, double-check that it's the right person, and then type in the event seed times. Searching and scrolling takes forever. I can type in the name and ID in about 10 seconds. A year ago, we rolled out online entries for that meet, which has helped enormously. We did online entries for the New England SCM meet in December, and will do it again for the SCY meet this spring. Given a world where USMS centrally has good data about registration in all LMSCs, I think some services that would be extremely useful are, especially if RE1 files aren't distributed: * An online registration check system. I put one of these together for the New England LSC (USA Swimming club level). Internally, it has the registration data for everyone in our LSC. As a meet director, you can upload either your meet entry file or meet results file from Hy-Tek, and it will check all of the registration data (names, DOB, ID numbers, clubs) for the people in the meet against the registration database. If there are any problems, it tells you what the problem is (although it doesn't give you the correction). For example, it will tell you that "RIKK OSTERBERG 010174RIK*OSTE - found match on last name and bithdate. Check spelling of first name". So it doesn't give away any sensitive information, just tells you what doesn't match. All of our local meet directors use it, and it helps keep our registration data accurate. And we don't give the meet directors any information that they don't already have. * A web service call oriented system to validate an individual USMS registration. Last year, I setup online entries for the New England SCY meet. Unfortunately, I can only do online entries for New England LMSC people because that's the only data I have access to. It would be useful if there were a programmatic interface, with security, such that I could be authorized to do repeated one-time checks for registration. I.e., someone comes to my online entries page, types in their name, birthdate, club, and then I do a real-time check against a USMS interface to get a "yes" or "no". If it's "yes", then I know the registration is valid, and I allow the swimmer to process the online entry. This way, I don't need all of the information for everyone in the country. I only see information about people who are actually entering the meet. It could be setup to be securely restricted to authorized users, perhaps as "blessed" by local LMSC officers. -Rick

Now I suppose you could also go to a partial USA Swimming model, and require meet directors to submit entries to the LMSC registrar for meet recon a certain amount of time before the meet. It would certainly cut down on the ability to do deck entries, and it would probably add to the workload for the registrars. Not a bad idea. Or at least maybe require entries to be done electronically only, via Team Manager. That would put the onus on each individual team's registrars and coaches to keep an up-to-date file. But this also would probably require that teams start paying a lump sum entry fee, and then have to collect somehow from their members... who knows... Anyways, Rob, I think some of my examples were certainly a bit irrational, but heck, someone has to bring them to the surface... and make up new words for Jim to make fun of :-) The "event participation implied concent" thing makes perfect sense, and I am glad that my internal interpretation of that is in line with what USMS (or at least its President) was thinking. I'm hoping some sort of arrangement will be made to exchange this information with meet directors. Perhaps meet directors can submit a listing of entrants to their LMSC registrar, who can check off only those names and return a re1 file with only the information of those people.

I am glad that my internal interpretation of that is in line with what USMS (or at least its President) was thinking.Note – the opinions expressed by me on this forum are not necessarily those of USMS. In fact, often members of staff and the Board are known to cringe when they read my posts. As an event director, I completely agree USMS needs to provide effective tools to assist with athlete registration. I love working meets; I hate typing and verifying information in Meet Manager (no knock on Hy-Tek). I’m supremely confident that the USMS “End-to-End Event Management” task force will make these tools a reality. Soon!

From Thomson - Privacy: Role of the Organization Concept of privacy - Simply put, privacy is the right to be left alone. If a person has disclosed personal information of a confidential nature to an organization, it must not be disclosed to a third person without the consent of the discloser. Some people may feel that their age (not on your list, but used as an example), gender, club affiliation or even membership in USMS is a matter of personal privacy. And while gender, club affiliation and USMS membership generally fall into the category of ordinary personal data, age and an individuals USMS number could be considered as sensitive data.

I'm hoping some sort of arrangement will be made to exchange this information with meet directors. Perhaps meet directors can submit a listing of entrants to their LMSC registrar, who can check off only those names and return a re1 file with only the information of those people. I can't imagine doing this for our 500+ entrant December meet. Let me rephrase that: I would resign this job before I do that for all of our meets. The majority of our meets and open water swims allow deck entries. On average, about 50% of the people attending any event deck enter. That means on the Friday before a weekend with a meet or an open water swim I'll get about 8 calls DEMANDING that I fax a copy of their card to the swimmer because they can't find theirs to bring it to the event. The other 2 calls would be people asking very nicely if there's any way they can get a copy of their card.

If we are no longer allowed to provide meet directors with a list of local swimmers (I have always provided a list containing name, bdate, USMS number, club affiliation, gender) I can see us turning MANY swimmers away from meets and telling them they can't swim because they don't have their card with them. I consider meet directors a part of our organization, and I have no problem requiring them to have a confidentiality agreement on file before they get this information. But we would be doing our members a huge disservice to deny meet directors this information. As Top Ten recorder for a large LMSC, I can also envision that it would be a huge headache to get meet files with errors all over the place, missing ID numbers, etc. I'm already spending a lot more time on registrations than in past years, I don't care to have Top Ten duties multiplied as well. Does this also mean that we are not allowed to provide clubs with lists of their registered swimmers? Right now we have clubs that can access their lists through the CA interface, with no controls other than CA has given them access. Perhaps we need to have a NON-competitive membership category, where the member will not show up on any lists anywhere with address/bdate, etc. Only name and membership number on club lists.