Friday, December 31, 2010

Happy New Year to all

We've been struggling with re-installing some details of the WCF web site after the attack on our service provider 10 days ago - especially the News section on the home page, which eventually Brian Storey had to re-load from scratch (thanks Brian for all your work on this).  If you find any nooks or crannies that don't work properly, please let me know - though I've still got a long list of information updates to make.

I'm hoping that I can now get back to working with the Management Committee to progress some of the many items we're currently wrestling with.  The largest single item is a 10 Year Schedule of future events - we hope to publish this early in the New Year and then call for bids to host events for the next couple of years.  We've done a lot of work on this but still need to pin down exactly which options we're going to recommend to the Member associations.  There's lots of other interesting topics to get to grips with too, so I'm looking forward to a productive year ahead with the WCF MC.

I hope you have a great New Year and have many enjoyable and successful croquet games in the coming season (or rest of the current season if you're in the Southern Hemisphere).

Martin French

Monday, December 20, 2010

WCF website back up

It seems our service provider was attacked and many of its servers were compromised, not just the WCF website.  I have deleted and re-loaded the website from my local copy.  I have not yet been able to copy back up all the videos and photos (as they are huge and take 10s of hours) - I'll add them over the next few days.

For some reason the News feed currently doesn't work.  This is linked from another service provider, and as I can't access their login page either, I wonder if they are having problems too.

Anyway, apologies for the service interruption.

Sunday, December 19, 2010

WCF website hacked

Just a quick post - we have detected that a lot of the files on the WCF website were altered at 04.51 this morning, and finding the site via a Google search yields a malwear warning.  I suggest you do not access the web site for the rest of the day while I re-load it.  In particular, check any link before you click it.  I will post another blog entry when I've fixed it.  Thanks.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

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!

Thursday, December 9, 2010

A leap in the dark

...well, a step anyway.

With Brian Storey's help, I've managed to make my first faltering updates to the WCF web site.  Brian created the site in its current form when he was S-G.  I'd mugged-up on Dreamweaver and created simple "Hello World" pages, but the full splendor of the WCF site rather took me aback.  We've copied it all to my PC so I can work on it with Dreamweaver.  It's huge!  3.8Gb of data and 6,911 separate files.

I was warned it could take 30 hours to download it all. In the end, it took about 3 hours - maybe my broadband connection isn't too bad after all.  With Brian's help over the phone, I've made the first small updates - such as to the placeholder for the 2011 Womens GC Championships, which had been showing duff information for a little while.  I've removed the wrong info and put a temporary notice there for now.  We are close to completing the agreement for this event, which we expect will be in late November 2011.  More details will be announced as soon as the deal is confirmed.

Having seen just how complex the inner workings of the web site are, it's going to be some time till I work through the long "To Do" list for the web site.  I'll do the simple changes to information first, before I do anything that involves changing the structure or mechanics of the web site.

On a different topic, I was really pleased to be able to reach an agreement quickly to move the planned 2011 European Team Championship from WCF to CA control.  The English CA have agreed to take the event on, which has been arranged for Cheltenham in England from 23rd to 26th June, 2011. More details will be published in due course by the Croquet Association.  My thanks to Jonathan Kirby and colleagues at the CA for a speedy and positive decision.

The next challenge is to propose to our Members an outline schedule for all WCF events for the next 10 years, so we can plan further ahead.  It's a big task so that will keep us busy!

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Making decisions at a distance

I've worked with international bodies, and for a global corporation before, so I knew decision making was going to be a slow process in the WCF Management Committee.  Don't get me wrong, this is NOT because we're trying to be slow.  It's just the reality - to explain:
  • there are 9 of us
  • in 5 time zones that span 21 hours
  • it's always the croquet season for half of us at any time - so there are always going to be people away
  • face-to-face meetings are at best, annual, and usually only some of the members can get there
  • everything is done by email (we're trying a little Skype conferencing too).
This means we give a topic a reference, so we can each track the numbered email threads.  Part of my job is to manage the process, so I kick off the topic, give it a number and some initial outline or proposal.  Then I give the discussion some structure - we start with a discussion stage (1 week) and if we're lucky, by the end of the week I can update the proposal to make it much more complete and likely to be accepted.  The improved proposal is circulated for formal comment (another week).  Occasionally, there is such close agreement after this stage that we can close the topic off then - we've agreed it "by consensus".  More often, we may need to iterate, revising the proposal again, taking further comments, and so on (another week or more) until we have a clear proposal we can vote on.  We then have a final week voting cycle.

All this means many topics will take about 4 weeks to reach a decision.  A few things may be agreed more quickly - and others may take longer.  A particular problem I'm finding is that I know so little of what went on previously - and we could do with more continuity so we avoid chewing over stuff that was discussed a couple of years ago.  To help this, I'm starting a rolling log of what we've agreed, with an index - so at least from now on, it is possible to easily trace what has already been covered.

We have made really good progress in sorting out the 100 or so "To Do" tasks we started with 3 weeks ago, and have created specific groups to tackle Development, the Regulations, and Tournament Development.  We've also nominated specific MC members to take the lead for each of the championships being run or planned in 2011 and 2012.

One of the big improvements I hope we can make very soon is to publish a 10 year rolling schedule of when we'd like to hold each type of championship - and then start asking for bids for the next couple of years. Thereafter, we can hold an annual round of requesting bids for a few years ahead.  This will give us more opportunity to manage the process and to advertise in better time what events are being staged.

And finally, a bit of movement on the web site front.  I've been filling up my head with Dreamweaver tutorials so I can drive the software to update the site, and tomorrow Brian Storey (the S-G before last) is kindly talking me through connecting to the live site and grabbing a copy of all the pages.  So if it all goes dark tomorrow, you'll know I did someting wrong!

Thursday, December 2, 2010

What a good thing it's snowed!

Here in England, we're having our heaviest early-winter snow fall since the last ice age.  This looks very pretty...


...but even better, it means I can really get stuck into the WCF Management Committee work and learning about our web site.  One of the MC members complained he'd been away for 3 days and come back to 75 emails from the MC.  And these are not quick, short little emails, they are often quite lengthy and arguing complex points about complicated issues.  Well, that will teach him to go away!

We had our first attempt at a Skype conference yesterday.  It's so difficult to find any day or time when nine people spread all around the world could possibly all meet up on Skype.  This time, we only had a couple of us on the call, but 6 of the 9 members are now using Skype so we hope to make this into a useful weekly supplement to the many email threads which will remain our main way of working.

The Dreamweaver software arrived on Monday, so I have started the tutorials.  We need this software to update our web site.  It's a very sophisticated piece of software, because we have a very complex web site that blends pre-prepared web pages with ever-changing information to produce the finished pages "on the fly".  So it's going to be a bit tricky to get to grips with.  Having looked at Dreamweaver, I'm confident I could knock out new web pages fairly easily - but of course, the main thing I need to do is go and grab the existing web pages, make small changes and re-publish them.  Without breaking them.  So I will be proceeding with caution and asking a friend does this stuff for a living for assistance at crucial moments.  The upshot of this is that, as I thought, it's going to take me a few weeks to begin to correct the out-of-date information currently on our site.  I am sorry about that and hope to fix it very soon.  Thanks.