What it adds
Fairness you would have to be superhuman to manage.
- It chooses receivers so that everyone touches equally, in an order nobody can predict. Names are dealt from a bag rather than picked at random, so an unlucky run is impossible rather than merely unlikely.
- It rotates the caller too. Left to social negotiation, the confident child holds the phone and the quiet one never says a name out loud — which rebuilds picked-last through the back door of the very role meant to spread the practice around.
- It speaks the name to one person. The app tells whoever is calling, privately; they say it to the circle. One phone serves everyone, and the caller hears the approved pronunciation immediately before producing it.
It never keeps a score for a person. No statistics, no rankings, no per-player anything — the level belongs to the circle, and handicaps go at the start line rather than into the stream. Those are properties of the sport, and the app is built so that it could not violate them even if a later version wanted to.
How a name gets recorded
Everyone adds themselves as the phone goes round. There are three ways to produce a pronunciation, and one rule over all three.
- Say it yourself.
- Have someone else say it — a friend, a parent, whoever says it right.
- Spell out how it sounds — SOH-kha rather than Sokha — and the phone reads it.
The rule: the owner hears it and nods. That is what makes a borrowed or a synthesised voice legitimate rather than the app anglicising a name on its owner's behalf, which is the exact thing this sport exists to stop.
Which of the three someone used is never recorded. An accommodation that leaves a trace is not one.
What leaves the phone
Nothing.
There are no accounts and no sign-up. Names, voice recordings and photos are written to the phone that recorded them and are never uploaded — there is nowhere for them to go. There is no analytics and no telemetry.
Deleting a circle in the app deletes its voices and photos with it. Deleting the app deletes them all.
This is also why it works with no signal. Once the page has loaded once, the whole thing runs offline — school wifi, a park, one bar in a field.
In a classroom
The only device is the teacher's. Children do not have accounts, do not install anything, and do not appear in any record — the phone holds a list of first names for as long as the circle lasts, and that is the whole data footprint.
Nothing needs to be provisioned, approved or connected. One teacher, one class, one sack.
Free, and not free
The app is free to use. sey — the sport, the rules, the name — is CC0 and belongs to everyone, including anyone who wants to build a better app for it.
B-Sey™ is this implementation of it. That name is not free. The sport is. More on that.