Hey all!

The Congress has ended and I've finally staggered back to my rightful coast, jetlagged but happy. As assistant director, it was really good to read everyone's thoughts & feedback on the congress, as well as actually getting an idea what it was like for an attendee -- i certainly had no idea at the time

I found a helpful reminder message from L19 about an old, old thread. Some things have changed since then, some new things have happened, and i'd like to kind of round up some of the thoughts that that discussion kicked off so long ago.

The AGA has a new membership database. The possibilities that this opens up for everyone are pretty remarkable. In short, we now have a modern, online database on which we can build some real, useful infrastructure. Everything from posting & tagging members in tournament photos, to parallel online rating systems, to members-only content on the website, is now enabled in a way that it never has been before. It's really rad, and we can really build some cool stuff on top of it.

Similarly, the AGA now has a github account for all of its open source projects. I saw at least a few suggestions for various code related things that could be done by the AGA to offer some real value to members. It's at http://www.github.org/usgo . There's now officially nothing stopping you from starting a project, open sourcing it, rounding up volunteers, and making it awesome.

The AGA has been kind of terrible at these forums. I know i'm personally 30k at staying on top of them. As such, though, i'd like to ask: what do you all suggest? Is there anyone who can help the AGA monitor the pulse of the L19 community?

to resurrect steve's thread & give it a twist -- what would you like to see the AGA's website do? What sorts of things would you expect it to make easy?



anyway, i'm still a little jetlagged, but now that one job comes to a close another one begins -- and this one looks really, really promising. Would love to kick off a good discussion; jump in?

I suppose I count, now.

_________________
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
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My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

that you do! \o/ ! wahooo! I know who i'm asking in the future

Its not necessary for every board member to monitor the pulse of the community here, but there should be at least a good representation. Maybe a virtual Chapter who can be heard at Chapter meetings.

I'm not entirely sure regular members feel their voices are being heard through their chapter reps now.

what is the relation for board member to chapter representatives anyway?

It feels much easier to throw stuff out on a public fourm than to try to go through channels, but it doesn't matter if you feel both are getting ignored. (its ok if they disagree, but at least acknowledge a valid opinion)

We can discuss what the AGA is doing for its members and chapters to make it worth membership. Not everyone has time to dig through minutes to see what all the plans are. I suppose a web site is cool, but I'm not sure of the added value.

I'd like to see an AGA leadership that lays out a meaningful long-term plan and a serious set of objectives. Read through the minutes of the board meetings from the past eight years and you'll see the same things hashed out over and over and over. I'd like to see the board and the president sit down and seriously talk about the top five priorities of the AGA, identify what resources are required to make it happen and then finding and committing those resources.

I can't tell what the AGA views as important, and I don't really feel inspired to work on something that will get brushed aside when it's finished.

Why is it that http://www.usgo.org/board/ApprovedMinutes/ isn't updated anymore?
Some board members stood on a platform of making the board meetings more open, and that clearly isn't happening if the meetings are now effectively secret.

Is it just that the new webmaster forgot or something?

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North Lecale

There has been some turmoil concerning the AGA webmaster position. After one was dismissed the replacement person stopped working without quitting the position, finally did quit, and a replacement hasn't been found yet afaik.

How can we get more details about the AGA membership database? I did a quick look at the github site and didn't see anything. Is there an API or web service that we could use to write code against?

Our coder who wrote the membership database did eidogo and the tournament crosstabs. When he is not coding go web apps he does do web sites for a living and half the time we chat he is coding some sort of api for those applications as well. There is a fancy API for the membership database but I am not sure how he/andrew want to disseminate that information at this point. Alf Mikula got his hands on it and took a look at congress to help us redo/integrate the chapters(http://www.usgo.org/chapters.php) web page. I'll ping them and see how they want to handle this for you.

_________________
Decisions are made by those who show up.
and possibly those willing to attend secret meetings in ancient basements

This is a great point. What things would you like to see on such a list?

_________________
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

To semi quote a couple of board members when asked about long term plans "every one has a long term goal, theres about 40 of them". I cant remember ever hearing of a unified long term plan from any AGA officials except for maybe that webmaster guy a couple years ago.

_________________
Decisions are made by those who show up.
and possibly those willing to attend secret meetings in ancient basements

Maybe it would be worth attempting to have the board make an official statement on the matter? It seems like a relatively common criticism, that the AGA has no direction/changes its mind frequently/etc.

_________________
That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.
--
My (sadly neglected, but not forgotten) project: http://dailyjoseki.com

The new system is live and functioning, but is still undergoing development. There's a REST API for interop with other AGA systems (congress, ratings), but not a public one yet.

For a public API, there are privacy considerations (what's ok to share?) and also technical ones (should we require accounts, impose rate limits?). At the least, though, we could start by providing the TD List data in a nicer format (JSON), with querying features.

Does anyone have specific ideas about how they would like to use the API?

Truthfully I don't think any of the AGA people long term goals; they have dreams. An American professional system, tournament sponsorship, more volunteers than they can shake a stick at, etc. These don't count.

Serious planning means scoping out what you want, and how you intend to get there.

Let me share with you my last experience with the AGA, when I was doing the ratings. I had conveyed my intention to move on, but that date was still a few months away and there was time to start and finish one more significant project. I knew that a rank certificate program had been on the AGA's radar for a very long time, and had been told that it was a priority. It was a regarded as a potential revenue generator for the AGA--they had visions of being able to charge a fee (nominal or otherwise) for the certificates.

I had already put in some work sketching out the system, and had a basic one that worked pretty well already. It needed fleshing out, but there was plenty of time for that before I finished off.

I went back and told them that, yes, this could be done in short order. But in order to do it, we would need an electronic certificate template and a programmer who could write merge a person's name and rank information into the template. With that was in place, I could write all the back-end code that would do the statistical calculations and figure out who was eligible for which rank certificate. The timeframe for finishing this was a couple of months.

Now ask yourself, how hard would it be to find a certificate template and a programmer in the AGA community? Programmers are pretty common, especially for time-limited programming like this. If the AGA has no other choice they could go down to Kinko's a pay someone a few bucks to do a fast template design.

Instead, absolutely nothing happened. Time dwindled away, and now the AGA doesn't have rank certificates. This was something that was supposedly a high priority. I realized that 'high priority' was just a code word for 'nice to have if you deliver it in a packaged deal all ready to go.'

If the AGA is going to move, it has to have real priorities, where lesser things are dropped in order to advance important things to completion. The priorities need to be agreed upon and communicated to everyone so that the necessary resources can be marshalled. Otherwise, the only advancement that the organization will be able to make is with projects that a single person can start and finish, without any involvement from the leadership. That doesn't bring the AGA very far.

That would be a huge understatement. Actually one screamed from the platform in a very public dispute, got elected member at large and made a lot of promises, but nothing much came of it, as far as I can tell. I'm still waiting for this so-called transparency.

That's a sad story. When the KBA dan-level certificates were handed out as prizes for winners of the U.S. Open dan divisions, I had assumed that this was what had become of the certificate idea. Just a gift, not a revenue generator, and not even originating from the AGA completely. (I think it was Myungwan Kim's idea / sponsorship.)

I'm not saying the prize is a bad idea, but now it would be harder to do AGA rank certificates, because now people might think, "Hmm. I could pay for one from the AGA, or I can win one from Korea. Doesn't that make paying for one seem kind of lame?"

Your point is pretty clear, though, Phil. Priorities that just amount to one person's nifty idea or pet project aren't real priorities.

Good point. I would like to see the AGA implement some sort of scorecard system, agree at least annually what the priorities are and how they are to be measured, and then publish the scorecard of performance against the goals. Not hard to implement and would give members a simple view of priorities and performance.

I sent an email a couple months ago offering my help, got a reply that they were interested, and haven't been contacted since.

Forget the AGA, I'd like to see our political leaders do that one.