Hi guys,

A couple of things I wanted to announce about the Open Study Room:

We introduced a Double Digit Kyu League

This league is for players in the 10 kyu -> 30 kyu range to find and enjoy a friendly yet competitive place to play league games. While these players can enjoy teaching games in our standard leagues, the higher likelihood of defeat makes those games lack the thrill of competition. Player can always find help in the OSR room when it comes to reviewing their game.

We can host Community Leagues

I always saw OSR as a place that can help the online go community to organise and set up leagues. We just finished building a system that allows us to host leagues for other go communities.

These communities can create and manage their own leagues by themselves. Communities can be closed (one needs an invitation to join it), open, private (no one can see them) or public. It's even possible for a community to host multiple leagues at the same time!

So if you have a go community and want to use the OSR league system, feel free to let us know!

You can ask questions to Master Guo Juan 5p. She answers monthly.

Yup, you read that right!

Here is the recording of the first session where she was answering to these two questions: 1 and 2.

Questions are open to all OSR members and we try our best to record the event every time.

Huge thanks to Guo Juan for that!

An OSR survey 6 months after

Some of you might be familiar with OSR, some might not. Anyway, please allow me to explain what has been done in the last couple of months.

In late february, when I started OSR, almost everything had to be built from scratch. We didn’t even have a domain name for our website.

In a little more than 6 months, we have more than 250 registered players who have played over 400 long and serious games with a review at the end. Thanks to the support of online teachers (including Guo Juan 5p and Alexandre Dinerchtein 3p) we were able to set up around 20 free public go teaching events given by strong teachers (have a look at our calendar for more details).

We are very grateful to them and to the team of the Internet Go School for allowing us to reward our winners with cool prizes every month. These include (but are not limited to) teaching games or reviews by very strong players, gift vouchers for Guo Juan's Internet Go School, etc.

Ideas and feedbacks from members allow us to build and adapt to their needs.

• We have a long term, more relaxed league called Meijin.
• We built a game planning tool that takes everyone's timezone into account.
• To allow easy go discussion we can now display some gobans in our forums
  

Future of OSR

We do have some plans. Many of them require coding effort (see our issues on github to get an idea) but the main projects at the moment are:

Support games played on OGS (Online Go Server)

Support bracket tournaments

In the long term, I'm also thinking aout integrating tools such as gokibitz to help discuss the games afterwards or to build a fancy go library for content we are gathering.

A vote is currently going on to see what OSR member would like implemented first.

Allow me to remind you that the Open Study Room is completely free, community driven, and run by few volunteers. On top of that, the code of our website is Free Software under the GNU GPL licence. You can find the github here.

If you like what we are doing, you are very welcome to join or to help us.

Climu, The OSR team