First Council papers go out - Hurrah!

I've had my head down the past few weeks getting all the main papers and Resolutions ready for the July WCF Council meeting.  The Management Committee has taken the responses from the two big consultations we ran recently - on the 10 Year Schedule of events and Decision-making in the WCF - and produced some Resolutions to Council which, if approved, would give us a clear long-term programme of events and radically improve how the Members control the WCF.  Of course, we didn't get everything right in our original consultation proposals, so we have taken the comments made on board and revised the ideas in these Resolutions.

Feedback on the 10 Year Schedule was very positive, but there were several comments that there were just too many events, and also concerns about the funding model for team events and how Knock-Outs are seeded.  So in the revised 10 Year Schedule that goes to Council for approval, we have reduced the frequency of some events while keeping the premier singles events every two years and world team championships every 4 years.  We've also dealt with the other two issues raised.

The responses to the Decision-making consultation were very positive except from one Member, whose circumstances are perhaps different to most: they are a federal body representing a number of independent state administrations.  I can appreciate they will find it harder than most to consult with their member administrations and collate their responses in the proposed new model, where issues are debated in email cycles and brought to a vote.  We've made a few changes suggested and will see what the Members think.

We also have Resolutions to ratify the new WCF Finance Regs and to accept the recommendations of the WCF Ranking Review Committee, which has been examing the AC world ranking system.  They have concluded a fairer representation of a player's current form would be given by a new Dynamic Grading system in place of the current CGS.  It removes the amount of lag before new results make a major impact on your grade.  You can check the system already - if you go to the World Rankings site http://butedock.demon.co.uk/cgs/rank.php, you'll find Statto has added  a Dynamic Grade radio button.  If you click that, you'll see how your position changes under the new system.  It must be a better system, I'm 11 places higher!

This isn't all the papers for Council.  While these had to be distributed 60 days before the Council meeting, there will be some supporting documents that go out 30 days before (17th June).  I'm working on those already, including the annual MC Report.  We should also have applications to join from:

• Croquet Federation of India
• Pakistan Croquet Federation
• Latvian Croquet Federation.

That will take us to 30 Members.  If we can reach 40, then we can start thinking about World Games, the Olypmics and so on.  Perhaps that's a good goal to set for 2020.  I'm drafting our Business Plan at the moment, and that gives me an idea....

Martin French
Secretary-General

Getting ready for Council

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

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

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.

The past is always with us

I'm currently struggling with the past.  Not all of it, mind you, but particular bits where people dispute what happened or what was agreed or have odd views about who did what and why. 

My S-G role is to make things happen, but it's tricky when people can't agree what has happened before I got involved, and whether it was right or not.  Hey ho.

The other thing I was amazed about this week were the reactions I got to a personal post on the NB asking for ideas on how to have a simple practical test for how firm a hoop is.  I set hoops a lot (I think I was RoT at 5 A class or championship events last season).  I've pondered this off and on for some time - and though it's not a difficult concept, coming up with a very practical simple quick field test for firmness seems difficult.  Anyway, I had a number of sensible, reasoned suggestions about what could be done (none quite meeting my requirement for "simple" though) but also a few quite strident responses assuming this was all a plot by the WCF to regulate hoop firmness and in one case extrapolating to ludicrous extremes (like being able to sue the organisers if the hoops failed the firmness spec!).  Predicatbly after such a silly statement, the writer then appealed for "common sense".   It's a funny old world.

Everything you wanted to know about WCF events....

Hurrah!  Finally, I've been able to press the Send button on a major piece of consultation we've been working on for over 2 months.  We were putting together about 6 or 7 proposals on various things to do with how to improve WCF events, and I sent the first one to the WCF Members for their comments.  Then it dawned on me we'd have a further 6 ready send all in the next month or so.  So instead, we've pulled them together into one large document, and it's gone out to Members tonight.

It centres around having a published 10 Year Schedule of forthcoming events.  We'll update it regularly, and the placeholders will gradually get replaced by agreed bids to stage specific events.  This will help Member associations - and players - plan further ahead, and also prevent the "clumping" of events that has sometimes happened.  All the MC has contributed ides or comments but I must thank Ian Burridge who has done the major work on the schedule itself.

What else does the document cover?  Well as well as the Schedule, there is information on the eight World Championship event types ( AC and GC singles and Team World Championships, Women's AC and GC events, and GC Over 50s and Under 21s).  We are proposing to halve the WCF License Fees, which host associations pay in order to hold a recognised WCF world championship.  We are also defining a clear annual bid process and timetable - we'll start shortly taking bids up till 2014, and then each year we'll call for more bids 3-4 years ahead.  And finally, there are a large number of detailed refinements proposed, for example to rules on seeding and draws.

I hope before long to publish the consultation document on the WCF website.  Now work starts on a second important consulation document, this one covering how to improve the involvement of WCF Members in the decision making process.  And tomorrow, I hope to announce the Under 21 GC world championship for July 2011 - so there's plenty going on!