I've finally got the last of the player info in for the July Golf Croquet World Championship (hurrah!) and only have a few items missing still for the Under 21s. I wouldn't have believed how much time and effort it takes to get biographies, photos and email addresses in. We're planning that in our new website, we'll have the ability for players to login and upload their own photos and bios. It will still no doubt take some chasing for updates and missing info, but at least I won't have to wrestle with all the wild and whacky formats sent in response to a request for "a Word doc or text".
We're holding a Council Meeting of all 27 Members at Surbiton, on Sunday 17th July - sandwiched between the Under 21 GCWC and the main GC World Championship, which starts on the 18th. All Resolutions have to be produced and distributed two months before - so by 17th May. So at present the MC is focused on turning a number of things we've been working on for the past 6 months into specific Resolutions to Council.
For example, I've gone through the 10 Year Schedule proposal and the responses to this consultation from Members, and we've identified a number of things for the MC to put in place and also 3 specific Resolutions to Council. There's also one area which requires much more thought than expected so we are delaying that till after Council - that's the question of what funding model should be used for team events. The consultation responses were all happy with how we handle event funding for singles - especially now we have halved the licence fee. But for team events it all becomes much more complicated - so we've put that to one side for now.
We've also got the first ever set of Finance Regulations and Investment Policy ready for ratification, and also a Resolution to start a 2 year trial of the new decision-making process we've recently consulted on.
So for the next 2 weeks, I think we'll be preoccupied with getting ready for Council. Though actually, I'm off to Hunstanton for the next 3 days for a tournament delightfully known to old hands as "The Pilchard"!
Let's hope the weather holds.
Martin French
Friday, April 29, 2011
Friday, April 15, 2011
Interesting responses
I've still been wrestling with getting the final bits of player info in for the two events we're staging this July: the GC World Championships (Hurlingham and Surbiton) and the Under 21 GCWC (Hunstanton). I have had to become expert at opening biographies sent to me in all sorts of whacky formats - for example I've discovered for .odt documents I can sometimes unzip them then read the XML content in Dreamweaver - and copy and paste the words into a Word document (the format requested)!
We've been running two large consultation exercises recently with our Members, and results have been coming in the past couple of weeks. The first, called "10 Year Schedule" is the MC's attempt to pull together everything it can think about regarding events and a 10 year forward plan of which events ought to occur when - and ask the Members for their views on a number of ideas and loose ends. Responses to this have by and large supported the MC proposals and we've started considering what Resolutions we need to put to the Council meeting this July to turn them into definite plans.
The second has been on Decision-making in the WCF. The MC's proposal was to change Council into an engaged, decision-making body that worked via 21-day managed email cycles. So an issue might be handled in 3 cycles: initial debate; revised proposal; formal vote. Hopefully, the Members will get more opportunity this way to see and understand the opinions of their fellow Members. The current Resolution and Amendment model can result in some unintended outcomes, which would have bene avoided had there been more dialogue before the vote - that's what I'm hoping we can improve upon. The first two responses received were interesting - and 180 degrees apart. The first agreed with every part of the MC's proposal. The second pointed out that they were simply not resourced to handle the internal discussions required and to respond with their official views within 21 days, and preferred the existing model where people were elected to the MC to make such decisions "for the good of croquet" - with the backstop that Members can always overturn MC decisions if they think we've got them wrong. I can quite understand this response - it was well-argued and wasn't hostile to proposal, just thought on balance they were happier with the current model. It will be interesting to see how the remaining responses pan out.
Must dash now - the season (in UK) starts now, so I'm off to Southwick for my first A-Class wekeend of the year. Time to think about my goal for the season: probably "to get my Grade over 2400" - I've been stuck just below for the past couple of years. Have I plateaued??
Martin French
We've been running two large consultation exercises recently with our Members, and results have been coming in the past couple of weeks. The first, called "10 Year Schedule" is the MC's attempt to pull together everything it can think about regarding events and a 10 year forward plan of which events ought to occur when - and ask the Members for their views on a number of ideas and loose ends. Responses to this have by and large supported the MC proposals and we've started considering what Resolutions we need to put to the Council meeting this July to turn them into definite plans.
The second has been on Decision-making in the WCF. The MC's proposal was to change Council into an engaged, decision-making body that worked via 21-day managed email cycles. So an issue might be handled in 3 cycles: initial debate; revised proposal; formal vote. Hopefully, the Members will get more opportunity this way to see and understand the opinions of their fellow Members. The current Resolution and Amendment model can result in some unintended outcomes, which would have bene avoided had there been more dialogue before the vote - that's what I'm hoping we can improve upon. The first two responses received were interesting - and 180 degrees apart. The first agreed with every part of the MC's proposal. The second pointed out that they were simply not resourced to handle the internal discussions required and to respond with their official views within 21 days, and preferred the existing model where people were elected to the MC to make such decisions "for the good of croquet" - with the backstop that Members can always overturn MC decisions if they think we've got them wrong. I can quite understand this response - it was well-argued and wasn't hostile to proposal, just thought on balance they were happier with the current model. It will be interesting to see how the remaining responses pan out.
Must dash now - the season (in UK) starts now, so I'm off to Southwick for my first A-Class wekeend of the year. Time to think about my goal for the season: probably "to get my Grade over 2400" - I've been stuck just below for the past couple of years. Have I plateaued??
Martin French
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