English Chess Forum

Roger de Coverly wroteInteresting. At the time that Game Fee came in, Essex decided that it would largely piggy back off this by charging clubs a higher rate than the ECF rate. However, it was always considered desirable to retain the concept of individual membership, so that it was clear who was entitled to turn up and vote at the AGM, even though the membership fee was initially set at a nominal £1.

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Birmingham did something similar: It retained the constitutional concept of individual membership and per-head charging, in case one day in the future, it had to suddenly change back to a per-head costing scheme. This came in remarkably handy this summer... or it would have done, but we decided instead to do something else which required a minor constitutional amendment.

Technically, the Birmingham League still charges a per-head fee to play in its competitions; but this fee is £0.

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One local county association wasn't bothered who turned up at the AGM , if they were interested enough and played chess in or for the county, they were welcome. The other used the common idea of one vote for each county officer, one vote for the club and one vote for each team, but they had to be individuals, so no massed ranks of proxies. So if you had three teams and one person who ran something at county level, the club has five votes but only if they get five people to turn up.

The only time voting rights really matter is when you are trying to abolish adjudication and adjournment. The county with the open structure had a near nem con in favour of a single time rate for all its evening competitions so the question didn't arise.

Counties and leagues had three options or a combination thereof
(a) withdraw wholly or partly from national grading
(b) find a way to charge £ 2 per game per non member
(c) exclude wholly or partly non members from competitions

Given the BCF/ECF have been running a "compulsory grading scheme" for nearly sixty years, most elected for some combination of (b) and (c).

Outside of Yorkshire, there's another example of an option (a) county, namely Cumbria.

Their website says
http://www.cumbriachess.org.uk/page/2/



It's not stated what happens in the event of a Cumbria game between an ECF member and a non-member as to whether or not it would be submitted to the ECF.

Presumably they aren't signing a Framework agreement.

(edit) Actually I think they are, because they are collecting money at a County level from individuals. Quite how that squares with "best efforts" or whatever the phrase is, if they run their local events on an optional basis isn't clear. (/edit)

This is a long post but hopefully of interest. Below is an analysis of Membership List counts taken at intervals of a week.

Notes:
1. All counts except those for stats 1, 3, 4 and 5 exclude memberships with a Due Date which is prior to the date of the source Membership List.
2. All counts are membership counts except those for stats 31 and 32. See below for further info on those stats.
3. Some counts were produced with reference to the Grading List. For stats up to 25 Sep, the Grading List used is the September 2012 revision, released on 26 Sep. For stats from 2 Oct onwards, the Grading List used is the October 2012 revision, released on 26 Oct.
4. 'Platinum - Old' (stat 6), for example, means membership taken out prior to introduction of new scheme and converted to 'Platinum'.
5. 'All excluding prior Due Date' (stat 2), 'Bronze - Old' (stat 23) and 'Bronze - Total' (stat 29). The 4 Sep figures look like aberations - 1,377 memberships had a Due Date of 6 Sep 2012.
6. 'Grade Ref appears more than once' (stat 31) is the count of Grade Refs which are shared by more than one membership.
- Where a Grade Ref appears more than once, usually it's because a member has more than one active membership (sometimes one of these is pre the new scheme and close to expiry). In a few cases a member has another member's Grade Ref!
7. 'Membership Number appears more than once' (stat 32) is the count of Membership Numbers which are shared by more than one membership.
8. 'Membership has no Grade Ref' (stat 33).
- Counts include memberships with a Grade Ref of 'None', 'N/A' etc.
- On inspection it appears that in many cases a member is listed in the Grading List but Grade Ref has not been set in the Membership List.
9. 'Membership has a Grade Ref which isn't in the Grading List' (stat 34).
- Memberships with a Grade Ref of 'None', 'N/A' etc. are not counted.
- A few members have their grade rather their Grade Ref recorded. Many values don't conform to the format: six digits followed by a letter.
10. 'Member's last name doesn't match last name in Grading List' (stat 35).
- The Membership List was linked to the Grading List through Grade Ref.
- In many cases there is a difference in spelling. For example, 'Bennet' vs. 'Bennett', 'Plum' vs 'Plumb'. Sometimes the Membership List name will be correct; sometimes the Grading List name.
- In many cases, the First Name and Last Name appear to have been inverted.
- In a few cases, it appears that an incorrect Grade Ref has been recorded against a membership.

Comments:
11. The are almost 7,000 new memberships - not bad going.
12. Work is needed on data quality (see counts for stats 31 to 36 and for stat 2 vs. stat 1).

Edit: Fixed error pointed out by David Gilbert.
Edit2: Stats updated to include counts for 23 Oct.
Edit3: Stats updated to include counts for 24 Oct and 25 Oct. Further stats in attached spreadsheet.
Edit4: Stats for 24 and 25 Oct removed; stats for 30 Oct added.
Edit5: Recalculated stats for 2 Oct to 30 Oct as previously dates with a year of '50' or '51' were interpretted as being for 1950 or 1951 rather than 2050 or 2051. Added stat for 'Membership No incorrectly formatted' (#36).
Edit6: Added stats for 13 Nov

It's an internal Northumberland issue mostly, but their county website says about their recent Congress.
http://ncaleague.wordpress.com/



That implies the ECF have got a system of invoicing from the grading records sorted out. I don't know if it means they can also track receipts by Congress.

Andrew Farthing announced at the AGM that Congresses were now being invoiced. It seems to me (see two posts above) that there are still data quality issues with the membership list so I think Congress Organisers should be advised to check their invoices carefully.

Yes, receipts from congresses and leagues will need to be tracked (a process which proved problematic for game fee).

Also, recepts from Paypal and credit/debit card service providers will need to be reconciled.

I imagine that invoicing for Leagues will be different to invoicing for Congresses. There needs to be allowance for the fact that a player may have been a member for some games but not for others (if an old scheme membership carried through but expired during the course of the league). (edit)There will also need to be allowance for any interim payments (as required by the Game Fee Bye Laws) made by leagues.(/edit)

Andrew Farthing also said at the AGM that approximately half of new memberships were being taken out through the Paysubsonline facility and half (including those through MOs) were coming through the Office.

Angus

I counted ten "3-yr Jnr Gold (expires 31 Aug '15)". Have you missed these or are they counted elsewhere?

David, well spotted - thank you.
I missed that the names of two Categories had changed: '3-yr Jnr Gold (expires 31 Aug '15)' and '3-yr Jnr Bronze (expires 31 Aug '15)'. I've now amended the table. Two 'Other category' totals have also changed.

I see the ECF are trying to outlaw selective grading for members only.
http://www.englishchess.org.uk/?p=22015

This was, still is, advocated in some quarters as an essential feature of a membership scheme.

I'm not sure how the ECF would detect a league being selective if they took measures to obscure the data.

Matches of varying size within a division would probably be the biggest red flag. (True, there are perfectly valid reasons that can happen, but it would nevertheless be the sort of thing that warrants investigating.)

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That and the absense of results for non-members.

I wonder, will this result in a greater or lesser number of graded games, with more income or less income for the ECF?

Leagues imposing 100% membership requirements won't have any non-members. It's an issue for club championships as well, but probably easy enough for the club to define games involving non ECF members to be "not for grading" friendlies.

The membership list crashed through the 5000 mark this morning thanks to 465 new enrolments - the biggest one-day intake so far - largely thanks to the Birmingham and District League?

That makes 5293 members on the new scheme against a target of 8870 - good progress!

And that's another 199 today. It adds up to 664 new enrolments in two days! It's a record breaker! There are now 5492 entries under the new scheme and a further 1150 in-date members under the old scheme - a few are duplicates mainly due to people taking out new memberships rather than renewing.

I'm mildly surprised by the odd name changes appearing. People I've known for years by one first name, which is used on the grading database, actually have a different one on the membership list! This sort of thing can play havoc with data linkage but of course it's not uncommon. My old Aunt Maude was really Florence - a morbid tale, when she was born a neighbour had looked into her cot and said "Maudie's back", referring to my Aunt's likeness to her already dead sister. Thereafter she was always known as Maude.