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Source: ONE News
Nearly 1,100 athletes competing in 10 sports over three days at the Special Olympics creates a lot of results.
Getting that data organised, sorted and tallied is the responsibility of Tim Stonehouse.
An IT expert who will be running the Games Management System (GMS) for Special Olympics New Zealand at this year's National Summer Games, Tim is part of a global team of volunteer software experts who maintain GMS, the competition technology that is used to register the athletes, keep a record of the results and post the results on the internet.
Tim has been part of the Special Olympics internationally for five years, helping out with the GMS software. He has been involved in Special Olympics New Zealand since 2003. He has been to the last three world games - the winter games in Nagano, Japan in 2005, the summer games in Shanghai in 2007 and the winter games in Boise, Idaho earlier this year. This is his second national games.
GMS was created by New York-based software company Bespoke. Reuben Silva, SOI Technology Competition Manager, first became aware of Tim when he extracted Special Olympics data from an old computer programme called Beach Balls and put the data into GMS in 2003. Later, Reuben brought a number of IT experts together for a conference to expand the use of GMS software.
Tim became involved in Special Olympics to bring his IT skills to the organisation. He says he wants to use his professional capabilities to help the athletes. There are a large number of people working together and Tim says he is just one piece of the machine that needs to operate so the Games can run smoothly.
For two days prior to the National Summer Games and the three days of competition, Tim will be sequestered in Games HQ - the nerve centre for the computer programme. Computing results of sports played at Arena Manawatu - where the Games HQ is located - will be done on-site; results for athletics, aquatics and tenpin bowling will be computed at their off-site venues and couriered to the Games HQ.
There are seven workstations connected to the database in the games headquarters and along with the nine IT savvy people at the offsite venues, there is a team of 16 people processing the results.
In every sport, athletes are divided into divisions depending on age, gender and ability with ability being the most important. Divisioning occurs on Thursday so Tim knows the IT team will be flat-out to organise all the athletes into divisions for the beginning of play on Friday morning. In each division there is a maximum of eight athletes and in each division medals and ribbons are awarded to first through eighth place winners.
The computer hardware for the Special Olympics New Zealand National Games has been provided by Datacom; Datacom staff is also volunteering to help with data processing.
