Even if it does eventually go wrong, I want to say thank-you to everyone that tried. Maybe mistakes have have been made but if so, let's look to learn from them and not to turn everything into personal attacks on people that may or may not have made them. The concerns that have been expressed about the project, such as in David's reply to my last posting are certainly worthy of consideration from an objective point of view. Maybe he will turn out to be right. But why, oh why, does a huge wave of aggressive emotion have to come with differences of opinion, such as that that has followed the postings referred to above? Let's not make this personal!
At the end of the day, the saddest fact of all to me is that we are discussing these matters now in 2008. This sort of project should have been looked at by the ECF as a body 20-30 years ago. And it is, because of the fact that nothing was done then, that the chess world is now so fragmented with so many people pulling in opposite directions doing their own thing for their own benefit that the English chess scene is in such a mess. Charles Wood was one of a few that was trying to cut his way through that and do something that was genuinely for the good of chess. Even though he has had to resign from the actual project, I know he hopes it will succeed. On the contrary, the established chess scene (especially in our neck of the woods) is full of people are only holding offices to protect people who have put themselves outside the ECF structures and who are therefore unnaccountable but with loads of power on the established chess world. And that is something I think we have to deal with first before we can ever get the structures that English chess needs to move on.
