Italian Informatics Olympiads in Teams (OIS)
The Olimpiadi di Informatica a Squadre (OIS) aims to be a team-oriented version of the already-existing Italian Olympiads in Informatics. This new project introduces many differences with its "individual" counterpart, one of the most important ones is the almost complete decentralization of the contests: there are four completely online rounds that lead to an onsite final.
The initiative started in February of 2010 in Italy as an idea by professor Giulio Angiani from "Blaise Pascal" institute in Reggio Emilia. The project was then developed and organized by professor Giorgeliana Carletto from "E. Fermi" institute in Bologna.
Initially, the OIS organizers lacked the technical expertise to run a contest so they relied on the Croatian Open Competition in Informatics (COCI) since they provided an online evaluator and English-language tasks. We are very thankful to Croatia for creating the COCI.
In 2010 only 7 teams were participating but, as the initiative started to catch on, more schools began to get interested. The Italian Olympiads in Informatics (OII) started backing the project by providing OIS with staff and resources so that, from the 6th edition the OIS, the project started running its own contests using beautiful and original tasks and grading students' submission with the open source CMS system, hosted on the OII servers.
In 2017, the initiative expanded to the international level. On May 17-20th 2017 the first edition of the IIOT was held in Bologna, Italy, with the participation of 8 teams from Italy, Romania and the Russian Federation. In the following years, editions have been hosted in Piatra Neamț (Romania), Moscow (Russian Federation), online for COVID restrictions, then again in Bologna (Italy), Port Said (Egypt), and finally in Damascus (Syria). During the years, teams from Italy, Romania, Hungary, Egypt, Syria, Russian Federation, Moldova, Bulgaria, Iran, Spain, Peru have participated in the initiative.