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Thread: Wiki re: Goal setting

  1. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kevin Pacey View Post
    If a server [deal] is ever acquired by the CFC (as in the past re: a deal), that'd be a big step forward.
    When we had a server deal, despite many people urging us to get involved with a server company, there was zero interest. I am probably the only person who actually signed up and tried it and I am not an online chess person. Given the number of volunteers and their limited time, I don't see us getting involved in that again. It would be crazy to spend our resources on setting up a server when there are so many of them out there.


    Then people won't need a place to meet, though online team events could happen later (there is a world-wide one I read of a while back that's a high level players one). Throwing in a few online chess variants besides chess cannot hurt too much (assuming not much extra cost for these, there's no need to promote them - people will just play if they like the look of any of them); crazyhouse is actually at least about half as popular as bughouse, going by when I last looked at the annual records of one chess server (2% of all games played in a year, including chess, were bughouse).
    There would be a lot of maintenance involved and it is not something the volunteers we have now are interested in or passionate about.


    It's certainly not enough to want to yet diversify the CFC's mandate for over-the-board play promotion to include perhaps even a few variants, especially given the CFC's currently limited resources afaik - other than having x funds available, I don't see what the CFC's assets are (e.g. compared to 2004 when the CFC had a physical office and books and equipment business - cannot recall if it had a print magazine still, too), so that's how I'd picture the CFC as still being essentially in survival mode, even though membership levels have slowly risen (have we got nearly as many adults as in 2004, with the full revenue they bring in compared to junior members? - that I don't know, and my laptop isn't up to handing the CFC website's apparent security concerns, so as to view old membership figures, or even to read the Handbook, say if I ever got back into governance).
    Our assets are probably the same as they were then but probably would not go as far in today's environment.
    Last edited by Vladimir Drkulec; 08-07-2019 at 02:44 PM.

  2. #12
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vladimir Drkulec View Post
    When we had a server deal, despite many people urging us to get involved with a server company, there was zero interest. I am probably the only person who actually signed up and tried it and I am not an online chess person. Given the number of volunteers and their limited time, I don't see us getting involved in that again. It would be crazy to spend our resources on setting up a server when there are so many of them out there....
    I'll have to talk to Halldor again sometime, to refresh my memory of that period. The CFC had the deal when he was Prez, and last I heard the CFC ED at the time simply got tired of running it (notably because someone overseas kept winning a prize offered instead of a Canadian).
    There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
    Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio.

  3. #13
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    It occurs to me now that we might be talking about two different server deals (the one with Halldor as Prez was long, long ago). Perhaps you mean the CFC had a more recent (brief) server deal that fell through. I now recall there were two such relatively recent (potential) deals that fell through, if I'm not mistaken (one was for a Quebec server-to-be, I think). Hopefully I'm not confused about all that.
    There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
    Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio.

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    There was a server deal that we signed and agreed to but no uptake and no volunteers. It died with a whimper and not a bang. This happened about 2015.

  5. #15
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    Yes. Now I located one thing from the 2012 Long-Term Planning Committee report that referenced the other potential server the CFC might have had (I think) that I was referring to:

    Investigate the seemingly too good to be true chess server idea and company suggested by FIDE.

    If I recall correctly, the CFC never ran with this possibility (no doubt for good reasons).
    There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
    Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio.

  6. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vladimir Drkulec View Post
    ...
    Our assets are probably the same as they were then but probably would not go as far in today's environment.
    I recall back in the mid-1970's, in some issue of the CFC's then existing print magazine (at that time called the CFC Bulletin) there was published an article by then CFC Prez Kalev Pugi concerning organizational growth (as relevant to the CFC). In it, towards the end of the article, he gave two fates for an organization like the CFC. One was success, with the organization prospering and becoming a respected member of the community. The other fate was a kind of slow death, where at some point everyone involved gets frustrated towards the beginning of the end. Right now I'm seeing the CFC as closer to the latter fate, in that it's been more or less stagnant for quite a while. Before the 2004-2007 period of near-collapse it had been stagnant, too, though I had thought of it as being at a higher sort of level since it had the assets of the physical store etc. that I referred to earlier in this thread. I may be conflating 'in a state of stagnation' with 'in survival mode' for the CFC as it stands today, but I think it's better to err on the side of conveying a sense of urgency, to avoid sleepwalking right into oblivion on the part of the CFC. An old saying (by a Canadian master?) is that having a bad plan is better than having no plan at all.

    On the bright side, once when I was pessimistic about the CFC's survival chances and said so on chesstalk, IM Tom O'Donnell referred to the CFC as 'Unkillable', since he noted it was the gatekeeper for submitting rated results and norm applications for FIDE events (or Canadian players) to FIDE, though he also noted that if it ever lost this gatekeeper role then he thought it would be dead, i.e. another organization such as CMA would step in at that point.

    P.S.: Here's a sad case of a large organization with not enough foresight etc. from the business world (rather than NFP or charity) - my father (and later brother. too) worked for it, and he saw the decline coming from a long way off, but there was little he could do since he was not too highly placed; in any case, sometimes the stench of defeat is really powerful:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digita...nt_Corporation
    Last edited by Kevin Pacey; 08-08-2019 at 07:04 AM.
    There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
    Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio.

  7. #17
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    Quote Originally Posted by Kevin Pacey View Post
    Yes. Now I located one thing from the 2012 Long-Term Planning Committee report that referenced the other potential server the CFC might have had (I think) that I was referring to:

    Investigate the seemingly too good to be true chess server idea and company suggested by FIDE.

    If I recall correctly, the CFC never ran with this possibility (no doubt for good reasons).

    Actually we signed a deal and needed to do some work on our side and have some volunteers as moderators and admins. Calls for volunteers came up empty.

  8. #18

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kevin Pacey View Post
    I fear this NFP Act will have a kind of crippling or at least slowing effect on any attempts to meaningfully change the Handbook, as I assume you refer to both paying the federal gov't for any changes the CFC ever makes, as well as the CFC having to wait for said gov't's approval of said changes. VMs will know this, and will tend to vote against any such changes when in doubt.
    The CFC has Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws. The former are hard to modify not only because of the price to be paid to Ottawa, but also because some changes may give voting rights to members who usually do not have such right.

    Bylaws are easy to change, they are only filed with Ottawa, they are usually not reviewed.
    Last edited by Pierre Dénommée; 08-08-2019 at 01:50 PM.

  9. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pierre Dénommée View Post
    The CFC has Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws. The former are hard to modify not only because of the price to be paid to Ottawa, but also because some changes may give voting rights to members who usually do not have such right.

    Bylaws are easy to change, they are only filed with Ottawa, they are usually not reviewed.

    Pierre is correct. Most constitutional changes require a two thirds vote. If there was a good reason for a change, I am sure that a two thirds vote would be possible with the right persuasion. Bylaws only require a majority vote in most cases. Adding a class of corporate members might have been a good idea at the time of the NFP changeover but the waters were muddy enough back then that we didn't want to add to the complexity.

  10. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vladimir Drkulec View Post
    Actually we signed a deal and needed to do some work on our side and have some volunteers as moderators and admins. Calls for volunteers came up empty.
    The following thread alludes to both a made-in-Quebec server and the old server deal the CFC had (under Halldor as Prez)... so it seems my memory was not entirely faulty about the 3 servers (and/or potential ones) I referred to:

    http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/sh...c+chess+server
    Last edited by Kevin Pacey; 08-09-2019 at 06:57 AM. Reason: Grammar
    There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
    Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio.

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