Chris Goodall wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 2:31 pm
This divide between the "promotional model" and the "enabling model" is just spin. Malcolm isn't talking about promoting the UKCC or the 4NCL or the London teams in the PRO Chess League on chess.com. His promotional model comes with the caveat "as long as it increases the amount of chess the ECF can tax". Promoting chess for the sake of promoting it, knowing that someone else is going to be "capturing" the "revenue stream", is too far outside the box. He's promoting chess for the sake of enabling elite chess.
Development Officers are a joke that has gone on too long. No-one except prospective D.O.s thinks we need D.O.s. Not even defeated candidates for the role of D.O. think we need D.O.s. If anyone hasn't read the D.O. job description, it's 9 pages of "working alongside" and "liaising with" and "supporting" the people doing the actual work. What work the D.O. is supposed to
do alongside those people is never explained. Like football agents, they magically add value just by being cc'd into emails.
I refuse to pay a membership fee to an organisation that wants to spend it on Development Officers, and if any local leagues feel the same way then my offer to provide them with free 3-figure grades still stands.
I see the "development officer" debate in similar terms to Chris. I'm not suggesting that development officers would be useless but, for those organisers who already have a fair idea of what they're doing, I rather think their help wouldn't amount to very much.
On the "promotional versus enabling" debate it's possible, in many fields of activity from national governments downward, to hold either of two views. One is what I'll describe here as a top-down approach, where everything is controlled and carried out by a central organisation, and the other a bottom-up approach where much is left to local organisations. In national terms, most people would probably opt for some form of hybrid model whereby a central body ran the armed forces and local bodies were responsible for bus timetables but this example leaves a lot of middle ground where either approach is possible.
When one talks of the ECF doing something, the reality is that it is individual members of the ECF who will actually be doing the work. And, unlike soldiers or bus-drivers, very many of those members will be unpaid. That means that, unlike soldiers or bus-drivers, there's no ready method whereby the ECF can compel them to do anything. So, if the ECF wants to take the lead in a particular area, it has either to command support among those prepared to do the actual - largely unpaid - work or else to be prepared, if and when volunteers don't wish to play ball, to pay people to do it. The reality is that, chess players being the contrary bunch they are, some people are bound to disagree with whatever it is the ECF wants them to do.
If I'm correct then, while I don't pretend to be able to assess whether Malcolm's proposed approach might be more successful, and I accept it's perfectly possible it might, it seems to me a near-certainty that it is destined to be more expensive.
