Certificate of Merit

[Ben Purton]

Why dont they just buy 10 sets for £50 ,I provide sets for all the stuff i do, not that i have much time to do chess atm but I prefer it to most things.

However as Andy suggests on facebook, sometimes you just dont need it

[John Upham]

I attended the ECF Office in Battle on Wednesday, November 25th 2009 and provided a demonstration of CoM to Kirstie Lapworth and Andrew Walker. We were joined for lunch by the acting CEO, Stewart Reuben. Lunch was very pleasant in a part of England untouched by the likes of KFC, McDonalds and other blights on the High Street.

CoM received very good feedback from KL and AW. We discussed the administrative aspects of the project and I left with a couple of process questions that require further thought.

Certificates have been sent to Yateley Manor School for presentation at assembly by Andrew Martin and I will take photographs for the CoM site. Permission will be sought prior to publication.

I am adding further admin utilities for the schools contacts plus the office staff.

I believe that we are making good and consistent progress towards the public live launch

Entering the anonymous office was quite a special experience in the use of paper filing : if you are a civil servant or you just like filing for the sake of it then this is a great place to hang out.

There was no risk that chess was being promoted or advertised by the office since there were no signs to that effect. I suspect this is dissuade visits from unwelcome guests such as chess players or those interested in chess.

The staff are drowning in box files of paperwork covering a huge time span. There was almost no clear desk space to be seen. There were piles of things such as unsold 2006 ECF diaries which presumably are waiting for a diary collector to purchase. An office fire would spread frighteningly quickly. A Health & Safety inspection would be appropriate but possibly unwelcome? The view from the windows was pleasant.

[Carl Hibbard]

The view from the windows was pleasant.

Any sign of the secret lorry delivery chess sets?

[John Upham]

Any sign of the secret lorry delivery chess sets?

There are two fundamental blocks operating here :

1. ECF Office staff are forbidden from responding to this forum : this they find very frustrating since (for a couple of persons at least) they wish to answer queries or add facts to the discussions. This stupidity must be corrected ASAP.

2. The ECF CfS coordinator is being kept totally in the dark by the purveyor of free sets. Schools are repeatedly asking for their promised sets but the ECF are not being provided with the information required to answer the queries. All incoming queries are being passed directly to the PR agency employed by HP. This is also a totally ridiculous situation which is damaging to the ECF. Pressure needs to be applied to HP to resolve this.

I can assure you all that that ECF CfS coordinator is working her utmost to make this project work whilst being treated like a mushroom. Its a pity that the ECF board cannot be more assertive with HP over this matter. I can see this project being dragged out as long as possible. I'll leave you all to decide why this might be.

[Alex Holowczak]

Seems to me as though Holloid wanted the ECF to help with their free chess set scheme, rather than the other way around?

Whose decision was it that office staff can't respond to the forum, and why was it made?

[Carl Hibbard]

Whose decision was it that office staff can't respond to the forum, and why was it made?

A board level "gag order" is currently in place over the whole project, so no information will be forthcoming...

Sorry

[Rob Thompson]

Can CJ as president not make a board level "Gag Order" just disappear?

[John Upham]

Can CJ as president not make a board level "Gag Order" just disappear?

The anti D-notice order would come from the CEO who is currently Stewart Reuben. The President does not wield such weighty powers...

[John Upham]

A board level "gag order" is currently in place over the whole project, so no information will be forthcoming...

Sorry

The D-notice goes beyond the Csfs project and covers the entire forum even to the extent that reasonable English chess questions may not be answered by the office staff. I would suggest that CJ be made aware of this and attempt to overcome this pathetic state of affairs. I wish him good luck in this matter...

[Stewart Reuben]

Please note I am not the acting CEO. That is Andrew Farthing. I am temporarily in charge of the Chess for Schools project due to the fact that Chris Majer is too busy.

Carl >Any sign of the secret lorry delivery chess sets?<
I do hope that was a joke. It is at the very least a solecism.

This forum was originally advertised as the Official ECF Forum. That should never have been done. It was compounded by not having the rider that views expressed did not necessarily represent the official views of the ECF.
The name adds problems. EC Forum reduces to the initials ECF and looks very like a certain federation. If the name were changed to Chess England Forum that would solve that problem.
Carl does his best to moderate the forum. But inevitably some poisonous comments get through.

Stewart Reuben

[John Upham]

Please note I am not the acting CEO. That is Andrew Farthing. I am temporarily in charge of the Chess for Schools project due to the fact that Chris Majer is too busy.

Once again we have found things out via the EC Forum rather than any "official" means.

This is a ridiculous state of affairs.

All the time that persons are too blinkered to realise that this forum is the most valuable source of information about the ECF regardless of the likes or dislikes of the ECF board will be yet more time and opportunities wasted.

[Carl Hibbard]

Carl >Any sign of the secret lorry delivery chess sets?<
I do hope that was a joke. It is at the very least a solecism.

Stewart it was yes, however the positive news of a lorry delivery a few hours before the AGM has not been followed up - what happened after that, surely there is more publicity to be gained?

But yet no additional press release and no further information at all, you have to expect some cynics?

Am I expecting too much?

[Carl Hibbard]

The name adds problems. EC Forum reduces to the initials ECF and looks very like a certain federation. If the name were changed to Chess England Forum that would solve that problem.

I did choose the name for that reason if I am honest

However I don't regard this as actually relevant in the new age of Google really but there you go, if I really wanted to take over the number one place for an "English Chess" search then I could quite easily do so regardless of what I called the site

I renamed it once at very short notice and have no intention of doing so again, sorry...

[Matthew Turner]

Stewart,
You are now in charge of the Chess For Schools Project and also the ECF's Director of Marketing. Could you at least confirm if what your predecessor said is correct?

Peter Wilson advises that ....

'Caroline Morris, Holloid's Chess Sets for Schools Project Manager, tells me that all of the sets delivered to East Sussex LEA have now reached the requesting schools in East Sussex. In addition 48 boxes of sets have been delivered to The Isle of Wight and most, but not yet all, of those 480 sets have reached the requesting schools in the Isle of Wight. Caroline continues to negotiate with other LEAs over further distributions of sets'

[Andrew Farthing]

Please note I am not the acting CEO. That is Andrew Farthing. I am temporarily in charge of the Chess for Schools project due to the fact that Chris Majer is too busy.

Once again we have found things out via the EC Forum rather than any "official" means.

The current arrangement is a practical one brought about by circumstances in Chris Majer's day job which mean that he has no time to deal with ECF matters during the working week. As a result, he asked me to cover whatever day-to-day business arose until the end of the year. The one exception to this, as Stewart has explained, is Chess for Schools, which Stewart is managing during this period. Chris continues to find time at weekends to deal with ECF issues, and we talk as necessary about matters of substance. This kind of situation is what the Alternate Director role is for, and it didn't seem like something that required a public announcement. I would like to think that the whole thing is seamless as far as the outside world is concerned.

It's been a while since I've posted anything on the Forum, and perhaps I should explain why. It's not a boycott, and I haven't been gagged.

Before the Council meeting, the Forum threads were dominated by exchanges about the elections to the Board. Things were said at the time that I would have loved to have commented upon as an individual, but I've learned from previous postings that I can't write anything here without some people interpreting it as an official ECF statement, so I felt that the responsible thing to do was to keep quiet.

Immediately after Council, the forum was dominated by discussion of the DCMS grant suspension. I'll admit that several of the posts were so misguided and/or misinformed that I felt they deserved a response. I would include in this the ongoing sniping at the ECF Office functions (revived in this thread). However, it would have been irresponsible to comment at the time. As you can imagine, the ECF Board and others were working intensively to prepare a robust recovery plan to satisfy the DCMS. For what I should hope are obvious reasons, much of that work has to be confidential; we can't conduct business like that in public. Whilst it may be possible to address specific inaccuracies in forum posts, the danger - as any politician would confirm - is that the process soon reaches a point where the only way to correct misinformation is by sharing something confidential. Even keeping silent, once the dialogue is opened, creates the danger of seeming to confirm one point or another. Under the circumstances, I decided that saying nothing from the outset was the right thing to do.

Personally, I believe that there is a place for the forum in the ECF's communications, and I definitely think that the ECF can get a lot better at listening to and responding to its members. We could do a much better job at explaining everything that the office does, so that people understand what they are getting for the cost. I am working on this, and I know that other directors are thinking on similar lines. However (and you'd expect there to be a "however"), there is still a lot of anger within the ECF at some of the things that have been said on this forum in the past, and this understandably influences the views of some.

Sorry, this is really long-winded. All I really wanted to say is that there are efforts within the ECF to change for the better. Some of what we're doing, we can share immediately in places like this; sometimes, we have to do the responsible thing and manage what we say for the time being. I apologise if we sometimes get it wrong in what we do or don't say. These are matters of judgement, and we're not perfect. For my part, I promise to be as open and honest as possible. What I ask is that the Forum understands that sometimes this still means that we have to be more discreet than you'd like.

Andrew Farthing