All I have to say is - I hope this is not the behavior you bring home to your spouse.

You guys gotta be kidding.

I said, REORGANIZE.

Use ur time to get things under control.
Come up with a complete and effective program.

I did not say to stop everything.

It's obvious from reading ur own minutes that nothing much is well organized.
Your own admission is that you have lost 75-90% of your "customers".
The minutes speak about needing to retain members.
How much more plain can it be?
I didn't write the minutes, did I?
When you read them do you get a different picture?

It's fine to want to defend your position, but do you have to make personal attacks and call me a "troll"? Is that absolutely necessary? Do you feel bigger after doing that?

Remember YOU lost 75-90% of YOUR customers. I didn't.
What business would you consider to be well run with those stats?
You buying stock in that company?
Are you going to?

Get real.

As I said, you'd shoot the messenger, dismiss the content.
As I said, the response is unchanged, unchanging...

Tell me how I am wrong.
Tell me that if I had said these things 5 years ago, that the response would not have been essentially the same?
Tell me that something has changed in the past 20+ years?
Tell me that if I go away and wait a year, two years that things are going to be very different?
Tell me.

Tell yourself.

I say given what I have read and seen that it is unlikely that the AGA is on a sound enough footing to execute what is required to not embarrass themselves with the Korean Association. If that happens, then it's not just the AGA, it's a reflection on everyone.

Furthermore, from the minutes alone it is obvious that one part of the organization doesn't know what the other is doing.

Explain to me how I have the picture all wrong. Go ahead.

And, btw, and fwiw there are a ton of people who feel the same way as I do. They just don't want to be bothered trying to deal with the "personalities" of many in the AGA, past and present. They don't want to spend their time even to post here in this thread.

It may be hard for some here to comprehend, but I would prefer to be found dead wrong, then I will be ok with being seen as a troll, if that's what it comes to. In other words, it would be BEST if the AGA prospered without my posting or doing anything at all, and all my writing turned out to be nonsense. Ok?

Anyone actually understand this?

I find it ironic that Go is a game of related abstract concepts, but in this situation the same skill set seems to be not applied or lost upon folks...

Let me say try to encapsulate the current theme of the discussion this way:
Get ur house repaired, clean and in order before you invite guests to visit.

_-_-

I think that ur house (http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings ... at_Ur.html) is probably beyond repair.

Yes you did.

Try reading what is there. Link the statements. Get a picture.

Everything I write does not need to be exactly perfect for the concepts to be valid. What is the REASON to do those two things?
Random thoughts? Capriciousness?

The key idea is to drastically reduce expenditures so that the money can be used for things that need money within the organization and re-organizational process.

The AGA might do well to transition to more of a professional organization model.

Wait, here comes another concept... if there were funds for part time or full time staff to handle certain tasks, perhaps the organization might run better and not be so dependent on continuity over time of "volunteers".

Now if I had just said to hire part time or full time staff, who would have connected the dots and come up with this reason to consider doing it?

If there are crucial activities that must be supported then of course one tries to find a way to do them. The key is to define what is crucial and what is just "nice".

_-_-

I think ur not being particularly clever.

That house at least at one time was a "great house".

When was the AGA a "great house"?

Ur turn.

_-_-bear

Wait, are you saying that dealing with the AGA is like a (my?) spouse?
(trying to say this in a politically correct way...)

Hmmm...

Well, let's pussyfoot around with it and pretend that everything is going just fine. We can go out to dinner and have drinks, be buds...hang out. I can make gentle suggestions that you will ignore. Or we can pretend to have the same views on almost everything.

Then we can try to find a consensus amongst a lot of people and go with that. After all that's how most successful companies operate, how the military works and how great breakthroughs in math and science have come. Yeah, and those folks who specialize in "corporate turnarounds", those people, they generally go with exactly what the management has always been doing. Yeah, yeah, and they take polls as they go along too...

Ok fine.

_-_-bear

I think we've fed this troll enough. Can we lock it?

my membership has lapsed from the aga. i was last a member in 2006. I for one will not rejoin. I was a long time member. Participated in many tournaments and attended two congresses.

I have seen a history of mismanagement and or pure ignorance that has caused the aga and the american go scene get a black eye and yes, I think Thomas (aka nomad) does a great job representing us.

1935—1990

1935?
Who played Go in the USA then?
How about in 1960?

What happened to change things in 1990?

Please explain?

Thanks.

http://www.usgo.org/archive/agahbk95.html

You're welcome.

I'm not sure how serious you were about 1990, but I don't see what happened then.

_________________
Occupy Babel!

Sorry but I am not following.

I see a nice chronographic synopsis of AGA history.
I see the founding in 1935.

The game was largely unknown in the USA (compared to today where it is virtually invisible) before the advent of the internet. So for most of that time there were rather few participants.

What is the significance of "1990" mentioned in your post?

And, how or why do you define that period as "great"?

Are you one of the people oft mentioned there?

_-_-bearzbear

Shhh. Just... shhhh.

Neither am I.

You are giving my comment far more thought than I am giving yours. To my own surprise, that means I am trolling here. Please excuse me as I duck out from further discussion.

apologies.

Not to be discouraging, but I've been lost for a while now.

I did not read many posts.

After trying a minute or so, it seemed pointless.
No reason to.

Sure I want to follow the discussion.

But, for example, attempts to decipher the motivation behind the OP were essentially fruitless. Even requests of a pretty mundane and simple nature did not receive reasonable responses. Unimportant in the larger scope of the poster's... actions, but seemingly emblematic of how his communication is "sincere". Or not sincere, as you may wish to think.

Unresponsive and impenetrable.

[TL;DR segment]

I suppose if I wanted to make constructive posts I'd have to have to read and research.

Shame it is. In my view, a shame.

Just saying. My views. Meaningless, really. Feel free to disregard entirely.

Orz illluck

Details could be posted, but why bring out all the dirty laundry. if you take your time and read the AGA board minutes, you will see a cycle of issues that keep appearing.

Even in the last miniutes posted (oct 2011 and where are the last three months of minutes) they state...



So the cycle continues because no one can agree or work on things.

Passing by this post, this brings up an important subject overall which is how to handle national associations.

This problem is absolutely widespread in go, almost all national clubs in the world are extremely weak institutionally. The AGA is probably one of the biggest out there in the west and for the very light exchange i saw by the board members here, it has the same feeling as Argentina's (and other clubs) problems.

The main issue i see is that clubs don't offer a valuable service to go players. When people receive value for what they give, you can gather funds to grow organically.
In Argentina the single benefit i got from my club was using the library: thats about it. And im one of the very few that devours it, most people dont use it. And people that are just a little away (20km) just wouldnt make the trip to get a book every month. They only pay for charity, or being hostage of the national tournament(its not open).

The other thing i notice about the AGA, which i might be totally wrong as i have payed partial attention to it in my lifetime, is that it doesnt have a clear face. I would rarely know who to talk to, or what to do if wanted to organize something with the AGA. I personally have contacted the president, but other people wouldn't want to do that. From afar, i get the impression the people working on it change very frequently.

The E-J is pretty good, its the best news source in the west right now. But I'm also a little discontent with them. In the past 3 years, i have sent over 20 e-mails, and only a few have been answered, with weeks delay and no fruit.This includes offering them a series of already edited articles i wrote about Go, which are ready to be published.
The very announcement of Kaya was done without talking to us, even though i sent a string of weekly emails from over a month before.

Now these are particular issues, and of course things boil down to that eventually, but the real issue i think is the lack of a measurable strategic plan. I think that is the #1 reason for failure for go associations in the whole world (including japan and korea).
There is a huge difference between saying "we spread go" and saying "we are going to create 100 new players in the next 6 months". The first one is never wrong, so it never provokes a change of tactic.
Go associations are not young, they have decades already but the strategy seems to be the same, one already proven to be unsuccessful, if you compare it to the growth of other elements in the gaming industry.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs