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For clarity's sake, I know personally nobody involved in AGA work with the exception of HKA whom I met briefly, but very enjoyably, for the first time in Baltimore a couple of weeks or so ago. It was a baseball trip and a holiday to clear my head of go. Go was not off limits, but almost was, and as far as I can recall it came up only in reference to attending future US congresses. Baseball and soccer dominated our talks.
My defence of certain AGA officials stems entirely from general principles, which apply to amateur go in other countries.
The main resource of amateur go associations is people, and a very special kind of person at that: volunteers.
Both society and amateur go have changed quickly in recent years. The impact is sometimes negative, yet the changes are often hard to identify and grasp. In go, for example, people often remark that tournament attendance is down, and extrapolate from that that there is a major problem. Maybe there is, and maybe the internet is to blame. But not too long ago there were hordes of kids at most UK tournaments, many brought by group leaders in mini-vans. As far as I know, there are usually none now - certainly none at at all at the last tournamemt I looked in on a few weeks ago. The main reason seems to be the difficulties caused by new laws and insurance conditions which require people dealing with children in groups to undergo checks on sex offenders' registers and things like that, and to pay higher insurance premiums. This alone could explain the sharp drop in attendance, and if so it is because of something outside of go and outside of go's control. There could be other factors, and no doubt several apply in some sort of mix, but my main point is that changes are occurring in society at large and the drop in tournament attendance, say, is not necessarily due to incompetent go officials.
I therefore find it desperately sad when amateur volunteers are blamed for changes out of their control. Even organisations with vast funds and armies of full-time experts are not exempt from mismanagement. For instance, whichever side you take in the argument between BP/Halliburton and the US government, at least one side has made a spectacular cock-up. In comparison with that, if a volunteer amateur go official, with no staff, possibly no training, no recompense and very little time, forgets something or makes a wrong call, that is very, very, very, very small potatoes.
I find it double depressing when they are attacked anonymously, but I make that point just in passing. This is not a recent thing, or just particular individuals, and in forum terms it was apparent even in long-ago rec.games.go days, but there have also been plenty of letters and e-mails flying around where carpers have identified themselves. It's the carping that matters, not the name.
Of course, both volunteers and the organisations they work for can always do better. But the way to help them do better is not to attack them by corporate standards but rather to understand the nature of volunteerism.
Some things don't change about volunteers. If you carp long enough (not very long), they leave. If you don't "do your bit" and help them out occasionally, they leave. If you take them for granted, they leave. If you overload them, they leave. If they leave, they rarely come back. If they leave for reasons such as the above, a message flashes out to other potential volunteers: don't be a sucker like me! Losing a volunteer is probably much worse than a company losing an employee. In short, volunteers need (I think HKA already said it) respect and support from below.
In my opinion, how you treat volunteers from the bottom up is far more important than how they are treated from the top downwards.
In any event, there are inherent problems in dealing with volunteers top-down. I suppose the main one is that most volunteers don't really want bosses. They've had enough of that at work, thank you very much. My sense of what is happening in the AGA at board level, however, is that some senior officials are trying to impose a corporate structure and to impose polices downwards. I have grave doubts whether that can work with volunteers who don't have to worry about staff appraisals and pay cheques.
I am reinforced in my belief by experience from London. A friend of mine joined an organisation which exists solely to guide volunteers to where they are needed. This sounds perfect on paper, but the reality is that most of the volunteers want to volunteer their expertise as much as their time, and so the list ends up being filled with ex-accountants, ex-teachers and other ex white collar professionals (apparently you rarely get things like ex-plumbers) when what most organisations desperately need is somebody to do a bit of washing up, to push a wheelchair for an hour, or just to talk and listen to someone. In go terms, amateur associations don't really need ten programmers offering to write a pairing program - they need people who will help make sure stones of the right number and colour end up in the bowls at tournaments, or who will give a lift to people without transport, or who will spend an hour with a beginner, or who turn up first at the club EVERY week to open the doors. But telling a programmer, say, to be in charge of the clocks is liable not to work.
Still, let us assume we can get a reasonable mix of volunteers - after all, volunteers often bring along family members who are willing to help out with some of the drudge. In that light, my vision of a perfectly run amateur organisation would still be one in which the elected leaders don't impose policies, but look mainly at what all the volunteers are offering and then orchestrating that. If all the volunteers want to run live tournaments, then that's what the organisation should concentrate on. That sounds platitudinous, but the reality is that many organisations tend to forget about their existing members (including the volunteers) and fret about getting more members. They try to find out what they have to do to attract new members and then try to subvert the organisation to do that (e.g. in go, focus on internet play, even if existing members want face-to-face go). That is not really "respecting and supporting" your volunteers. Obviously, in practice, existing members want a variety of things, and that may include getting new members. But doing that because it's what the members want is vastly different from doing it just because you believe it's a Good Thing.
Clearly I am implying that I believe there is a tendency for some go officials not to heed their members. Yes, though I also acknowledge that this may not be intentional and that there may be other factors at play. But, again on general principles, I personally view with alarm the way some people may, even if inadvertently, be selling their organisation's soul to the Olympic devil just to get hands on cash. There are also some people who claim to listen to their members but seem to listen rather more to the strong players. I view that bias with alarm, too.
However, I have to admit that even if I could, improbably, make all official' eyes swivel exclusively and equally towards all their members, that would be no guarantee of easy solutions. To my way of thinking, the biggest problem at present could be that there are an awful lot of volunteers, maybe the vast majority, who, as mentioned above. really want to offer their expertise rather than their time, so that there is a glut of certain kinds of expertise and a dearth of people to do mundane work. Under those circumstances, it must be tempting for hard-pressed officials to chase the money in the hope of being able to pay for the mundane work to be done, or, say, to pay for a specialist volunteer available in only one area to work temporarily in another (e.g. travelling TDs). Short of praying for a volunteer who is an expert at using other volunteers I wouldn't, myself, know what to do for the best.
The only thing I feel certain about is that existing volunteers must be cherished, not abused, even if they occasionally nod like Homer.
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