p2501 wrote:
For comparisons, the national fee per year in germany is 78 Euro (39 for students, 15 for children). (Members get reduced entrance fees for tournaments, a roughly monthly go magazine and membership is a must for participating in tournaments over titles (national/regional/...).
What quite a few people seem to be missing is, that javaness argues that they simply can not afford the membership because of their low membership. Any I have yet to see a reasonable argument against regulating the EGF-Membership-fees so that every country can afford to get it.
It would be interesting to know how much it costs to produce and distribute the
german go journal. I believe the journal is a major factor for recruiting members in Germany.
As far as I know it's just Germany, France, the Netherlands and Britain who have high
quality printed journals. This is not an option with too few players in a language region.
But it's an interesting question what the value (cost vs benefit) is of a printed journal,
in the age of electronic media. There have been many good online go journals in the last
10-20 years, but they don't seem to last very long, I wonder why that is?
If, as I definitely claim, the small countries get more back from their EGF membership
than they pay for, there is no need to discuss if they can afford it, any claim
that they can't is simply wrong.
At the risk of repeating myself, here are some suggestions of how to cope with the costs
in a small association:
* Don't take all the money as a flat rate membrship fee in the national association,
find ways to make those players pay more who actually are in a position where they are able to enjoy the benefits. One possibility is to collect dedicated fees from players who
participate in championships and tournaments that are used for selection for the sponsored
events. Those who are selected for those events could pay some fee to the national
organisation, or they could be persuaded to do something extra for the players who can't
be selected (teaching, write interesting travel reports, paricipate in PR events for go
etc), which in turn can make it more attractive to become a member of the national organisation. Making membership compulsory for participation in championships and other
tournaments may also be thought of as belonging to this class.
* Inform the members of what they actually get from the membership, avoid one sided
complaints about the membership fees, like this one.
* Be sure to make your members understand that they are part of a democratic organisation,
tyhey should take part in deciding how the common resources should be used, both at the
national and at the European level. Obviously transparency is necessary for this to work,
everybody should be able to see how resources are being used.
* Encourage your members to participate in European events (EGC, European pairs,
European students' European Team, European Youth, European Women) where they will
get benefits back from what they pay. Btw Javaness, when I mentioned the 6 keuro
EGF support for European championships I assume that it's the participants who are
at the receiving end, not the organisers.
* Where it's possible to do something valuable for everyone with a large number of
players but not with too small numbers (like a national go journal), try to establish
collaboration with other national go organisations to make it work. E.g. couldn't the
Irish collaborate with the BGA around the British Go Journal, so that the Irish could
get that as a membership benefit, presumably at small marginal cost?
* Most importantly, do whatever you can to make the numbers grow, so that the costs can
be shared between more people.
In my opinion it is ridiculous to claim that people in a European country can't afford to pay 20 euro per year to the national association that takes care of their hobby. Of course they can, if they don't want to there must be something wrong with the management and organisation. It really doesn't take much to make it worth it. Practically all efforts to
do anything, like organising tournaments and championships is work that some individuals
do for free, but which is for sure worth a lot more than say 20 euro per player and year. Whether at the national or at the European level, a common organisation is necessary to
have any championships and many other activities, it provides the necessary structure.
Finally, from an ethical point of view I find it curious if there haven't been any thoughts
at all in the smallest national go organisations around the fact that they have been invited
to send players every year to heavily sponsored international events over the past 20-30 years or so, on par with big associations such as the German go associations or AGA, even though they have remained stuck at 20 active players or whatever. Don't you think that this has been a raw deal for the players in Germany and elsewhere, Javaness? If you really insist on discussing the matter at the level of market value and profit for individual players,
the sponsored events could be seen as an incentive not to grow: with few players you have
larger benefit per capita. The 200 membership fee on the other hand goes a little bit in the
opposite direction - with larger numbers it's cheaper per capita, so it's an incentive to
grow, at least to 200 members. The sensible and responsible way to use sponsorship is of course to channel it in the direction of making go grow, that's what it's for. No offence intended, obviously - we have probably all been uderachieving in making go grow.
best regards,
Henric
P.S. There is nothing for the ratings or rules commissions in the EGF budgets for 2011 and
2012, but I think its clearly wrong to say that the ratings commission, Ales and Aldo et al. in particular haven't been doing anything. When the rating system was managed manually by Ales there must have been a tremendous effort going into keeping it updated. There is still a lot of work with it I think, like correcting for people who have been entered as sepasrate players with different spellings of their names and things like that. In terms of efforts and working hours I can't believe that any EGF officials have received undue gratifications, on the contrary - maybe it should be like that in an organisation like ours, but the rating system and other facilities have to be continued, one way or another. Anyone who finds that someone is working on something at inappropriately good conditions should step forward and offer to do it himself, no?