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Variety of rounds in Sudoku GP and Puzzle GP

Here's something that I noticed that I thought I would share.

Counting from 2017 onwards (since I had a bit of behind the scenes knowledge prior to that), there seem to have been a certain skew towards which countries contribute rounds.

For example, in the Puzzle GP a total of 15 different countries have supplied rounds to the 4 series. I was surprised to see that there were some "ever-present" countries in the list: namely Bulgaria, India and Serbia. Czech Republic have also been ever present if you count the joint effort with Slovakia. Turkey, Netherlands and Slovakia (counting the joint effort) have contributed 3 out of 4 years.

In the Sudoku GP there are a total of 17 different countries, with Serbia again being an ever-present. Netherlands have also been ever-present if you count the joint effort with Germany. India and Netherlands have contributed 3 out of 4 years, and if you count the joint effort then so also have Czech Republic and Slovakia.

There also seem to be an increasing number of countries who do the "double" for both Puzzle and Sudoku GPs.

2020: (5) India, Serbia, Czech Republic, France, Hungary
2019: (5) India, Serbia, Turkey, Czech Republic/Slovakia, Netherlands
2018: (5) India, Serbia, Turkey, Netherlands, Slovakia
2017: (4) Serbia, Netherlands, Czech Republic, Slovakia
2016: (4) India, Netherlands, Serbia, Russia
2015: (2) Netherlands, Serbia
2014: (2) Japan, Turkey

As far as I was aware (which is up to 2016) there was some kind of policy which tried to make sure the rounds were evenly split between as many different countries as possible to encourage puzzle creators from as many different countries as possible (with certain mitigations needed for the earlier rounds which only a few people were in a good position to provide).

This does not seem to have been the case in the last four years however, and so I have two questions: (1) is there a policy to ensure the rounds are evenly distributed between countries and (2) how many times have countries other than ones above been turned away?

It looks like only communication channel from WPF is currently via members.

I remembered some previous years (end 2013, end 2014, end 2015), WPF director did public notices (via facebook for example) concerning seeking authors for GP.

Perhaps it played a role in what you describe here.

Fred

If I remember correctly some years there were a lack of authors willing to host GP rounds and so every country who applied got it.
It seems in the current year this is not the case - there were enough applicants and hosting countries were chosen on "first come - first serve" basis.

I agree that communication is handled very poorly at the moment. Both regarding WPF issues, as well as for this GP round.
However, "first come first serve" is not what happened. There were too many applicants and we were asked to find solutions like collaborations. This lead to the NL+German round. (However, beeing asked to sort these things out in a 48h time frame after months of silence and followed by another month of silence was not very nice either.)