Open Study Room

Project Description

The online Go community is so rich and enthusiastic nowadays that we think it needs and deserves a place for players to socialise, play, teach, study and learn together.
With the strong belief that we can achieve and learn more together, the Open Study Room (OSR) is run by a team of volunteers from all around the world and driven by its active community. It is, and will always be free and open to everyone.

Since we also believe that playing long, serious games is a very good way to improve, we organise various Go leagues to fit every player’s needs. These leagues reward activity and the main idea is to play competitive, serious games in a friendly environment. We strongly encourage reviewing the games afterwards and stronger players often help.

Thanks to the donations of some of our 700 members and support from kind teachers, we are able to set up lectures on various topics and to reward winners of our leagues with Go teaching. For instance, we host monthly questions and answers with Guo Juan (5p) and reward one of our league winners with a teaching game with Alexandre Dinerchtein (3p). All our events are free for all to attend, recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel.

To organise all this we have a website (located at https://openstudyroom.org), where we host a blog, a forum, our leagues, and a calendar where players can schedule their games together in advance. Our league system automatically gathers games from the OGS and KGS go servers. All those tools are free software, so everyone is free to use it as they want, but also to help in building it (we now count 21 forks and 12 contributors on github).

Day to day, we mostly gather on our Discord server where we discuss theory, review our  games, study tsumego, follow and encourage each others' improvment.

Since we build tools for the online Go community, we think it would be a shame if those tools could not help others. To this end, we can host some other Go communities (a Go club for instance) and allow them to use and administer their own forum and leagues within our website.

In few words, we are a community of Go players and a team of volunteers trying their best to organise and provide Go teaching content and build tools for the online Go community.

Aim of the Project

Open Study Room shares, builds and organises knowledge, opportunities and resources for learning, studying and playing Go online as part of a thriving worldwide community. We welcome everyone from beginners to strong dans and help them in learning Go online.

Location

The Open Study Room is an online community of players from all around the world. Hence our activities are online.

Timeline

• 18th February 2017: OSR is born. We build a community of Go players who play, study and learn on the KGS Go server.
• 4th March 2017: After some users’ suggestions, we create a Discord server for chatting and reviewing our games with audio.
• 1st May: First lecture from a professional Go player (Guo Juan 5p).
• 6th July: We release our game planning tool.
• August 2017: First teaching game with a professional player (Alexander Dinerchtein 3p) as a prize for a league winner.
• 7th October 2017: League games can now be played on the Online Go Server (OGS). The players can choose where they play their games.
• 4th March 2018: Article in the AGA E-journal about OSR passing the 500 users mark.
• March 2018: OSR hosts the Creators’ Invitational Tournament featuring many online content creators.
• 27th Mai 2018: First live tournament open to every OSR members.

Means of the Project

The OSR website is a free software Django project using the Python programming language. We are using the KGS, OGS and Discord API to interact with these platforms.

We have a Facebook group with more than 180 followers, but we only use it to advertise our events; we also advertise our events on Reddit’s Baduk subforum at r/baduk and on the Life in 19x19 Go forum. We recently started a Twitter account and our community can support us on our Patreon.

Results

• In only one year, we have allowed users of all levels and backgrounds to get together and play more than 1400 long, serious games, often followed by a review.
• We set up more than thirty teaching events (simultaneous games, teaching games, game reviews, and lectures) with teachers ranked at least 4D EGF. Thirteen of them were done by professional Go players. All these events were free for all to attend.
• We hosted three free online screenings of the Surrounding Game movie.
• We created a free tsumego pdf collection.

Human Resources

It is a community-driven project. At this time, the core of the team is made up of five people. Many others help in various areas (coding, organising events and so on). We can't count the hours that have been spent creating the website, organising events, and managing the community.

Financial Resources

We recently made a post explaining in detail our 1 year budget and our plans for the future, here.

Our expenses are:

• Server cost (around €6 per month).
• Teaching.

Our incomes are from the Go community:

• Donations from our members (250€ in one year).
• Patrons on Patreon (30€ per month).
• Sponsorship from Guo Juan and the Internet Go school with free gift certificates and monthly question and answer sessions.
• Some teachers provide a Discount or free teaching to support the project.

Exposure

The AGA E-journal wrote an article about OSR in their E-Journal.

• We have more than 180 followers on Facebook.

• We have more than 200 subscribers on YouTube.

• We were mentioned by the Online Go Server on Twitch and Facebook here and there.

• We participated in the Twitch plays Go event, introducing Go to 17,000 viewers.

Perspective

Globally, we would like to offer more teaching and specially directed toward the strong players. It could be a monthly teaching game with a professional as a prize for our winners and a monthly lecture where users can vote for a topic.

We plan to build an active league for dan players, with a teacher looking at their games and producing a related lecture on a monthly basis.

We are going to register as a Non Profit Organisation to gain a legal status.

Wishes

We are open to work with and help any Go community or organisation. We can host their online go leagues or tournaments easily or help them redeploy our tools on their end.

We hope to find more partnership with strong teachers to provide quality Go content and help players.