Tabbycat is a draw tabulation system for British Parliamentary and a variety of two-team formats. It was used at Australs 2010 and 2012–2019, EUDC 2018, WUDC 2019–2022 and many other tournaments of all sizes and formats. To see an example of a post-tournament website, have a look at the WUDC 2022 tab website.
Want to try it out? The best way to trial Tabbycat is just to launch a new site, as described below). It takes just a few clicks, requires no technical background, and you can always deploy a fresh copy when you're ready to run your tournament.
- A range of setup options. Tabbycat powers Calico, a paid service for hosting tournaments. Tabbycat can also run as a local installation (natively, or via Docker) and be deployed to the free-tiers of the Render or Heroku platforms.
- Enter data from multiple computers simultaneously and (optionally) display results, draws, and other information online
- Collect ballots and feedback online, or from printed forms customised for each round ( adjudicator feedback questions and rankings are configurable)
- Automated adjudicator allocations based on adjudicator ranking, debate priority, and conflicts/clashes
- A drag and drop interface for adjudicator allocation that displays conflicts alongside break liveness and gender/regional/language balance considerations
- A responsive interface that adapts to suit large screens, laptops, tablets, and phones
- Support for British Parliamentary (EUDC/WUDC), Australs, NZ Easters, Australian Easters, Joynt Scroll, UADC, and WSDC rule sets as well as configurable draw generation rules and team standings rules
Our user guide is at tabbycat.readthedocs.io.
Tabbycat can be deployed in a number of ways.
Calico is a managed hosting service run by one of Tabbycat's developers. For a flat fee, it will host tab websites, automatically manage their setup and performance, and provide ongoing access to the released tab. Click this button to deploy to Calico:
Tabbycat is no longer available as a 1-click Heroku installation. If you do not want to use Calico, you have a few alternate options:
- For online tournaments where long-term data preservation is unnecessary, we have a 1-click installer that uses the Render platform and runs within its free tier of services
- For tournaments where online access is unnecessary, you can install and run Tabbycat from your own computer
- For online tournaments in general, you can still deploy to Heroku, but will need to run a script from your computer's command line
If you have any feedback or would like to request support, we'd love to hear from you! There are a number of ways to get in touch, all outlined in our documentation.
Contributions are welcome, and are greatly appreciated! Details about how to contribute are also outlined in our documentation.
We also invite new translations of the interface through Crowdin! Get in touch for access to our translation platform.
We haven't released Tabbycat under an open-source licence, so there is no formal and general right to use this software. Nonetheless, you're welcome to freely use Tabbycat to help run a debating tournament. However, if your tournament is run as a for-profit or for-fundraising activity a donation to Tabbycat's maintainers is required. More details are available in our licence information.
Tabbycat was authored by Qi-Shan Lim for Auckland Australs in 2010. The current active developers are:
- Philip Belesky
- Chuan-Zheng Lee
- Étienne Beaulé
Please don't hesitate to contact us (e-mail) with any questions, suggestions, or generally anything relating to Tabbycat.