http://www.usgo.org/board/ApprovedMinut ... -10-05.pdf

Last year, it was incredibly clear that the TD's for the Open worked ridiculously hard. Normally, there can be a half hour to hour delay, but there was no such thing. When I was in Korea two years ago, I watched the broadcasts also start very promptly.

I'm glad the organizers were in favor of paying the TD's for their diligence. I think they deserve it.

But we appear to be scrapping that now. It's apparently too much to ask for good work to be paid for, whether it's TD's who work their butts off, to foreign pros who spend their days shrugging off jet lag to give reviews, lectures, and simuls.

Between that and the policy on membership renewal, and I've just had it up to here with the AGA. I don't think I'll be going to Congress this year.

Well, look at it like this: For every good egg, you have a few bad ones. I mean, it's not a viable excuse for poor service, but it could be just those few individuals. I'm sure the AGA has plenty of dedicated people working. This comes from a beginner, but that's just my personal opinion.

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Slava Ukraini!

I would agree with the title of this thread, even if I do not agree with all of the details of this post.

The AGA, well, not simply the AGA, but face to face go is really in trouble in this country. While numbers of players and activity on the internet continue to increase, the AGA has failed to harness this energy in any effective way. I am not sure how much of this is the AGA's leadership's failure, as opposed to the ease and ubiquity of the internet - but you cannot call it a success.

I see a decline of tournament activity around the country, and, with it, a decline of opportunities to train Tournament Directors to handle events like this. With a Congress pricing structure that effectively makes the attendance of my three person family with a barely interested daughter untenable - I can understand resisting wanting to pay for folks flights. But we have failed to plan for better alternatives.

When I ran the Congress, I had local TDs who were up for the job, so I did not face this problem. But the AGA needs to think ahead on these things. I think it is a mistake to have the same folks, however wonderful they are, doing the same jobs every year. To me it is better to use the traveling Congress as a traveling training center for skill sets that will be useful for running tournaments, workshops and camps throughout the country. If we build such a talent base, we will be in a better position to at least avoid the necessity of buying folks plane tickets.

Congress Directors should plan to train their staffs. If you are going to run a Congress on the West Coast, then have your proposed Open Director help with the Cotsen or other big events. The sadly defunct Oza tournaments were other opportunities to train new blood.

But folks do have to step up. And this is the real challenge. 20 years ago, if I did not open the club every Sunday, there was no go in Baltimore. If I wanted to find new folks my strength to play - I needed to go to the New Jersey Open.

Today, we are at a tipping point. Many still like face to face go enough to come to tournaments or come to club. But more and more are saving the gas and simply turning on their computers. And when folks like me tire of committing to running a club, no one is raising a hand from their mouse to say "I will take over". And less and less are seeing the necessity of learning to run tournaments.

I wish I had an answer to this. But I do not hope and do not think the solution is paying staff, certainly not at the size this organization is and without any significant sponsorship.

But I also know that there are not many folks around like Sam Zimmerman, who will take on all this work and ask for nothing. Or, humbly, me, who paid for his room and board the year he ran the Congress. And maybe it is unreasonable to expect folks to step up and do this work simply for the joy and satisfaction of showing freinds a good time.

But it is certainly unreasonable to expect the same folks to do it year after year, spend their money and work a good bit of the time.

We simply need more people. Sorry for the ramble.

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My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle

I agree with HKA that face to face Go is in a bad way. I think it would be foolish to blame the AGA for this, but I will say that they seem to have squandered a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm that has been hurled at them over the recent years, and that makes me sad.

The traveling Congress is a wonderful way to train up staff who can then spread their knowledge to smaller and more numerous events. However, I do think it travels too much. There simply are not enough players/staff to reinvent the wheel year after year. I know there was concerted effort to centralize a good deal of the infrastructure after the most recent Portland Congress, but I do not know what came of it.
What I would like to see is a cycle of Congress between say three or four locations, perhaps one in each time zone. This would allow a location to build in certain key infrastructure elements. Within three or four years, a good deal of the elements in planning would remain unchanged. Housing, venues, staff would of course evolve but at least the starting point would be similar. A local staff could adapt to venue closings, staff departures, whatever. Most importantly, it would be in the back of their minds that this thing was coming back in a few years and steps could be taken as problems arise.
Now, this doesn't do much spread the knowledge to the towns and cities and that aren't one of the four. But there are solutions to that as well. Say a local TD for the Open, with two assistants (one local and one or two guests TD's) to shadow him/her and run the smaller events through the week.
By having a more solid base like this Congresses will be able to grow again. At 500 attendees (or thereabouts) it really stretched the limits of our "energetic" (if I do say so myself) club. I don't see how you could grow into events that hosted a thousand or more on this model.

All of that was a bit off topic, I guess, but that said. All the "energy" of our club that poured into the Congress is gone. We tried to build on it, but so far seem to be unsuccessful.

Not so simply, the AGA membership has been increasing over time (with the occasional dip in number) and yet the skill set and desire for leadership is declining. So more people is not what is needed. It is understanding why the people we have are not desiring leadership positions. By looking outward for more people, we will miss the fundamental problems. We should look inward to find the solution. Look for what can be done and progress will be made. Look for what can't be done and stagnation sets in.

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Michael Dobbins; Dragon: mdobbins, KGS: mgd, AGA#: 4253,
My Website

This paragraph roused my curiosity:

Mary Laird has been checking the PO Box every
other week rather than every week as in the past,
saving a few thousand dollars. Okun asked
whether it would make sense to change the location
of the PO Box to somewhere it doesn’t take hours of
effort to check. Abramson said the older members
like to keep the consistent PO Box out of tradition.
Li said there is a premium forwarding service
offered by the USPS that costs about $20 per week
to forward mail wherever you want for an extended
period of time. Abramson said he will look into it.

Does this mean that we are currently paying someone thousands per year to check a PO box? In the middle of Manhattan?
Surely this could be done by a volunteer. There must be some SDK in NY who would be delighted to check the mailbox regularly in return for online lessons from some dan-level players.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

I have offered to volunteer to help with things such as the database work a couple of times, but I never got a really great response... It's probably because there wasn't a great deal of work available around the times that I asked.

I have less free time at the current moment, but I might volunteer to help again in the future.

I guess there just hasn't been a time when both my schedule matched up with the time that the AGA really needed help, yet.

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be immersed

I went to several of the early US Go Congresses and if I recall correctly, all of them, including the tournaments, were run by local people. The pairings were sometimes a little late but everyone had a good spirit and it was no problem, really. I wonder whether the staffing problems are just a symptom of the decline of local clubs. Fewer club members --> fewer congress staffers. Managing a congress can't be such a big deal now since the general structure of events and activities has been pretty much the same for over a decade now. The moving around of congress locations was originally intended, I think, to even out the travel expense to attend. When the congress is on the west coast the costs are less for west coast people and less for east coast people when it is on the east coast. As for paying TD's, I'm not sure what I think. I know that TD's and other heavy duty staff basically don't get to enjoy the congress, so I certainly don't object to comping them for room and board. Pros should be comped because they aren't getting paid for all the lectures and simuls they do. I see a lot of griping about the AGA but very few gripers are stepping up to make things better. Mostly it is people who are willing to tell others how to do things but aren't willing to do anything concrete themselves. Another point is that it is difficult to manage volunteers. Volunteers are great but how reliable are they? Can you count on the same person being available for whatever you want or are you going to have to search for a different volunteer every time? A reliable, dedicated volunteer is worth his/her weight in gold.

I don't know the answers, and I'm not even sure the right questions are being asked. The continuing growth of the European Go Congress and (I believe) some recovery in tournament numbers in the UK suggest that face-to-face go is not necessarily dying, and if a thousand players can travel across the vastness of Europe (often coping with a foreign language), I'd expect Americans can just as easily overcome the vastness of their own continent.

But there does seem to be a genuine problem with volunteering. I don't think there's less of it in life in general, though maybe the nature of it has changed, but go at present does seem to has a special problem in attracting and keeping volunteers.

Volunteers by and large expect some recognition for their efforts but I think what they are looking for is something far more subtle than money, titles or pats on the back. For want of a better phrase, I think they are looking for community spirit. It is a feeling, to quote the Dunkirk evacuation currently being relived here in the UK, that everybody is "doing his bit".

My experience is that a person - call him A - is willing to spend a weekend, and several more days in preparation, organising a tournament if he feels that sufficient numbers of others in the go community are doing their bit. It doesn't have to be a lot, or to be structured. If B brings along a few spare sets, C gives a lift to a few entrants, D provides some biscuits, strong player E spends the lunchbreak teaching SDKs, F to Q help with the clearing up, and so on and so forth, A doesn't feel too bad about spending countless more hours than the rest, and I think that's because he feels part of a community.

When the communal effort breaks down (and I think it has recently), volunteers seem to go through two phases. The first is to impose conditions for their further cooperation. In tournament terms, an organiser will do noticeable things like imposing stricter deadlines, adding surcharges and making lots of verbal announcements. The underlying message is "look at me, I'm the one doing all the work". Once your organiser gets to this stage you are in grave danger that he will go to Phase 2 - quit. And if he does, it is not his fault, it is everyone else's.

We saw last year the disgraceful hounding of a couple of AGA volunteer officials largely by people who do nothing for the AGA. It is my contention that if these same critics were visibly doing something for the AGA, however small, at least one of those volunteers would not have quit.

We have the situation in Europe at present where a small number of self-styled strong players want the EGF to run events in a way that suits them. I see no evidence that these players are doing anything for me or the thousands of other players in Europe - just being "strong" and setting standard is an egocentric argument that I don't accept, no more than I accept their offer to do something for money. Because they are among the top players, they are prominent and their whining is very noticeable. The drip, drip effect on the motivation of people like tournament organisers is inevitably deleterious. I see signs of a Phase 1 "rebellion" by some of these valuable people and so I think it is important for concerned people to speak up now. Better still would be to do something that contributes to a feeling of community spirit in go.

Community spirit elsewhere is far from dead, but the combination of the Me generation ("I played this game on kgs yesterday - give me a review") and the fact that go is a competitive me-oriented game may be especially unfortunate for organised go.

I don't think we need be as dramatic as Kennedy and ask not what the AGA can do for you, but what you can do the AGA. All it needs, I think, is a stronger dose of empathy. I repeat, volunteers don't generally want praise or money - they want empathy. Which, had this been applied, would have meant that this thread would not have been started with such an awful, self-centred headline as "The AGA makes me sad".

I'm a little bit turned off by this comment. What does it cost you to get a volunteer to help? Nothing. Maybe they might not be available at times, but if somebody expresses an interest to help, what's wrong with letting them?

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be immersed

Kirby, I think gowan's point is that a volunteer who shows up once in a while is a good thing, but what the AGA really needs even more is reliable volunteers. To hold up an example, Sam Zimmerman agreed to take over the TD of the Open when the original TD bowed out. I'm no expert on AGA goings-on, but even in my limited exposure to congresses I've seen several times when Sam stepped up to fill in a huge chunk of work that suddenly needed to get done. Having people like Sam around is fantastic; "fair weather" volunteers are needed too, but I think that without at least a few hard working, reliable, and competent volunters there would be a lot of disasters.

(Note 1 - I count myself in the "fair weather" volunteer group, so I'm not disparaging them. When it's convenient for me, I'll volunteer, as I did at the Portland congress. But mostly I don't, I just enjoy the things made possible by other people's hard work.)

(Note 2 - I know that there are other dedicated people in addition to Sam, I'm just using him as an example since this thread started with a discussion of the Open, and it was Sam who took over for this year.)

I agree that having "reliable" volunteers is, of course, more helpful than having "unreliable" volunteers.

I guess that, just from an external perspective, if I volunteer a little bit, I'd still like for that work to be appreciated. If I volunteer a little bit and feel appreciated, I'd be more inclined to volunteer more and become one of the "reliable" volunteers.

I think that volunteering has to start somewhere. People that are more reliable will emerge, and will of course be even more appreciated.

But I think that it should start by showing appreciation to the "unreliable" volunteers. By appreciation, I think I just mean that their work shouldn't be shrugged off as being without merit.

If the unreliable volunteers feel that they are giving a positive contribution, then I'm sure that they will be more inclined to become more reliable in the future.

Edit: Conversely, if an unreliable volunteer's work is presented as worthless when compared to somebody in the reliable club, it's a turnoff for those that are just starting to try to help out.

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be immersed

I don't see what the problem is here. All sides seem perfectly reasonable to me. Of course, volunteers should expect to have their expenses paid - who rationally would pay hundreds of dollars in order to volunteer? And, I think, the board is correct to say that it is not a good use of scarce funds to pay to fly in volunteers. While it is nice that Jeff and Chris have volunteered year after year, the TD really needs to be found locally.

I guess these other posts are lamenting the lack of local volunteers. I do appreciate the several here who stepped up when GD went down.

I freely admit that I am not as knowledgeable about go in my own country than I am about it abroad, however this strikes me as quite strange from the countries main go organization. I understand well how difficult it is to stir up the desire from individuals to compensate a teachers time, I've often heard it regarded as little more than panhandling, but I would have expected better from the AGA, assuming that is the case.

It seems to me, and maybe I'm wrong, that at a time in which professionals in asia are having trouble with sponsorship, western organizations should be doing whatever they can to provide compensation to attending professionals. Especially as this in turn provides incentive for a higher player turn out. If the trend is, instead, going in the opposite direction, then it is more than just the AGA which is sad, rather one reason among many why go around the world is in a similar state.

Assuming the post is an accurate refection of things, of course. Quite hope it isn't.

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If Go is too complicated, you're probably forgetting the basics.

Yes, Joaz, the AGA pays someone thousands of dollars to check mail. It was one of Jie Li's complaints when he first entered. I like how we can pay Mrs. Laird to check mail, and yet we can't pay Maeda to come and teach Go.

Great Go association.

WTF? And what's this about "keeping the consistent PO Box out of tradition"?! Sounds more like "tradition" means "padding my pocketbook". I find this whole story very difficult to believe. How much snail-mail do they get anyway? And does the AGA publish an accounting or at least a budget, detailing where they get money and what they spend it on? Googling usgo.org didn't find me anything recent.

Edited to add: of course I find it right after I submit my post:
http://www.usgo.org/resources/downloads/rpt2009.pdf

I certainly hope some reading and filing is involved along with the checking...

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That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

I agree with your sentiments.

http://www.usgo.org/org/information.html
Go to main page->About AGA->Organizational Information
http://www.usgo.org/resources/downloads/rpt2009.pdf

The whole Manhattan mailbox thing totally confuses me, why on earth is somebody being paid to take the subway? Anyway, Tournament Directing a Congress Yuck! What a nightmare that must be. Directing my local tournament stresses me out enough, I couldn't cope with the 500 to 2000 people range.

Paying travel expenses doesn't sound that unreasonable to me, but I don't have any idea of the budget, and I don't know who else was there offering to be a TD.

I don't get how board members don't see the conflict of interest here, since Mrs. Laird is being paid, and Mr. Laird is one of the ones who doesn't want things to change.

And on helping the AGA, I was asked to become a TD. I've been a TD in the past for local tournaments, and I have a decent grasp of pairing systems, McMahon, Swiss, bands, etc. I'd be happy to accept, except that I had school eating up most of my time.

I fully intended on becoming a TD now that I have the time to, but the fact of the matter is that AGA has time and again let me down. The continuous membership, the removal of foreign pro support, and now, cutting funds for hard working people while spending tens of thousands per year on checking mail. I'm really not liking what the organization has come to.