Entries, entries everywhere

I'm up to my knees at the moment in sorting the entries out for the Golf Croquet World Championship and the Under 21 GCWC.  Both take place this July in England - the GCWC at Hurlingham and Surbiton (see http://www.gcworlds2011.org/ if you want more details and tickets to spectate) and the Under 21s at Hunstanton.

I hadn't been through the entries process before, and there's a lot more to it than imagined.  Things happen in 4 top-level stages:

1. the WCF works out how many places should be allocated to each Member association, based on their share of players in the World Top 100 (all Full and Associate Members get at least one place).  A small number of "wild card" places are reserved too.
2. the Members then send in their entries for their allocated places, which are accepted automatically - and any nominations they wish to make for a wild card place
3. the WCF then considers the wild card nominations and tries to share them out fairly, following half a dozen different criteria described in the Sports Regs
4. then I chase to get email addresses, biographies, photos and entry fees for each player.

Step 3 turned out to be both more difficult and more contentious than I'd appreciated.  For the GCWC, there were 38 nominations for 8 wild card places.  There were 5 very strong candidates - and then came a large gaggle of players all with quite similar rankings and playing history.  Trying to separate them was tricky! 

For the Under 21s we had a different problem - and a slightly revised process.  Members nominated players but for many of them (perhaps half?), they had no World Ranking.  This meant there was little information about their playing history or experience available already.  We asked Members to provide some details - and got widely varying levels of detail.  So this makes it quite tricky to make decisions.  The pressure was a little less, as there were 28 nominations for 24 places.

Now all that remains is to get in the photos, bios and entry fees!  What could possibly go wrong?

Decisions, decisions...

I haven't blogged for a while because instead of being pre-occupied with one main thread, the MC has had a lot on the go at once - so it hasn't been so easy to muse on any particular issue here.  We've also had entries and nominations coming in for the GCWC this July and the Under 21s that precedes it, which take some sorting out and chasing of photos, biographies, entry fees etc. for the players.

The big consultation on events we sent out a month ago is beginning to get well-considered responses now - and a couple of Members have asked for more time, which I had always suspected would happen.  We've also just sent out the second of these major consultations we had planned - this one on how to improve WCF decision-making.  Our statutes say the WCF is controlled by its Members.  But the existing postal-voting system, with 60 days notice required and 40 days for an amendment, doesn't really help the Members exercise this control.  What has sometimes happened with complex issues is that votes have happened at Council meetings, without a great deal of talking between Members before the meeting and with some of the key players not being present in Council.  The outcomes haven't always suited everyone.

So we thought it important to find a model where the Members talk to each other,  and where proposals develop and are brought to a vote in a series of discussion cycles.  Luckily, ubiquitous email makes this possible - and didn't of course exist when the Statutes were drafted.  The MC's proposal is to manage, for the Members, an email discussion system which would develop proposals over typically 3 cycles: 1) kick the idea around and get people's views, 2) come up with a reasonable proposal and get comments on that, then 3) vote on the revised proposal.  You can flex the number of cycles depending on the maturity of the issue and how quickly agreement is reached. 

This is essentially how the MC now operates. The MC operates on 1 week cycles, but we'll probably need 3 weeks or so for Council, because many Members have International Committees or Executives who will need to consider the proposals and agree their responses. 

I hope the Members go for this proposal, as it really will put control into their hands.