It pays to plan ahead....

....apparently.  I knew we were very close to finalising and announcing that the 2011 Women's GC World Championship would be staged by Croquet New Zealand in the Bay of Plenty region - but I hadn't prepared the web pages so they were ready to go as soon as the agreement was in place.  Doh!

As a result, I've spent 2 or 3 hours today wrestling with a placeholder entry on the 2011 Championships page of the WCF website, trying to add the relevant information about the New Zealand plans.  If it was just HTML, I could probably have copied and pasted in the text from the CNZ plan or their press release quite quickly.  But the combination of Dreamweaver, PHP and something called Spry Widgets made it less than obvious how to alter the placeholder to incorporate the new information.  Still, managed it eventually after several cups of tea and some swearing. 

The event will soon have its own website, run by CNZ, which will be linked from the WCF page.  But I think I need to learn a lot more about the technology behind our web site, as I came across some bits when making today's updates which were frankly baffling (bits that complained they couldn't be edited - after I'd edited them).   Amazingly, the web site is still running and shows the updated pages.

It's just over a month since I took on the role of Secretary-General to the WCF.  Impressions of the first month?

• it's easier to make group decisions in the Management Committee than I expected it to be - my role is to structure the discussions (all by email) to move things along
• we've had some good successes, such as agreeing with the English CA how best to stage the European Team Championships next year, announcing the Women's GC World Championships, and we're making good progress on a proposed U21 event for next year too.
• we're still in early days with Skype, but the 3 conference calls we've had so far have been useful additions to our email debates in the MC
• there's a lot of history and loose ends I'm still unaware of - and only find out by tripping over them (so it could be a long discovery period!)
• we need to spend a bit of time looking at how we're organised - the "50,000ft view"

This last point is interesting - we've already agreed how we're organising MC business, we're looking at a rolling 10 year schedule of future events (which will give hosts much more time to think about bids), we're just beginning to ask some questions about our financial model for events, and there's a lot of material from an earlier consultation on WCF structure which deserves careful consideration.  So we should have some interesting things to work through in the next month and I hope we can make a real difference in how we operate.  With the awful weather in the UK at present, at least there's not much competition for my attention!