The 2010 EGF AGM was recorded and can be seen on EuroGoTV1 http://www.ustream.tv/channel/EuroGoTV1

The meeting ran for about 6.5 hours and is divided into 4 parts as follows:

Part 1 060' 34" http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/8609667 - Agenda points 1-5
Part 2 138' 18" http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/8610926 - Lot of Talk
Part 3 180' 10" http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/8613288 - European Championship proposals @ 1:49:25
Part 4 011' 54" http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/8616007 - Tail end

The video for part 1 did not work for me

If you want to know how the EGF works and have the stamina then you should watch these videos.

The Agenda for this meeting is at http://www.eurogofed.org/egf/agm2010agenda.txt

Richard

problem the sound of my computer is not working anymore.
but it most be getting late at the end of the meeting.

I will wait for the minutes. (probably it will alsotake less time to read it, but i will miss the buzz

_________________
Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

EGF members voted for the system proposed by British Go Association.
7 rounds as usual, after that - play-offs for best 8 Europeans. After losing in play-offs, Europeans returns to Main tournament.
I can clearly see some pluses, but ...
If we check the current table after round 7: http://www.egc2010.fi/results/egc-main-results.txt
We can see that Taranu is on position number 9.
Imagine: Antti will play in play-off and will have a chance to become the European champion, but Catalin will not.

We will have a poor system again in 2011. But, I guess, I will be happy to see it used in 2010. At least I will have a chance to get better place than Ilya Shikshin and with the current system it looks much harder ( I have to win 3 from 3, Ilya must lose 2 from 3. No hope for SOS, if we get same 8 from 10 points

_________________
Go lessons: http://breakfast.go4go.net/
Russian Go news: https://vk.com/go_secrets/

The new system surely is not in force for 2010 already, is it?

_________________
A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

We will see the new system in EGC -2011

_________________
Go lessons: http://breakfast.go4go.net/
Russian Go news: https://vk.com/go_secrets/

With those two both being only a single game ahead of a 50% score it's not clear either of them really deserve to be in competition for the European championship. If they want to be champion they have to stop losing games.

This has been one of my underlying issues with all this EU vs EU required for European champion stuff. If the tiebreak leading European in the open is top because he beat those Korean 7 dans that the other tying Europeans didn't, that should surely count for something ?

I cannot believe that the AGM for an amateur association lasted longer than many professional games!

_________________
Still officially AGA 5d but I play so irregularly these days that I am probably only 3d or 4d over the board (but hopefully still 5d in terms of knowledge, theory and the ability to contribute).

Presumably (perhaps depending upon the prize money which might not be announced in advance) a European player with the chance to win the main tournament might prefer to stay in the main tournament (surely this can't be forbidden) and in this case we get the absurdity that the European Champion is not the strongest European.

I would like to understand how it is that last year there was a vote that the European Championship should not be affected by games with Asians. (Now, of course we have a decision that reverses this although it is presented otherwise).

I think that reflects the way last years' vote was carried out: three questions were thrown on the table for voting, without having been announced on the agenda and without discussion, just as the meeting was to be closed. One doesn't extract any well reflected views that way. From what I heard at the EGC, many were unhappy with the numerous proposals that had been prepared based on last year's decisions.

The proposal that was selected this year was not on this year's agenda either, which is a bit unsatisfactory. I would have preferred to see a final vote to choose between the knock out proposal and not changing anything at all, at least to have a clear picture of what the opinions are.

The knock-out proposal has a history. It was proposed by the Dutch in 2006 (KO after 5 rounds) and by Sweden in 2007 (KO after 8 rounds). In the pre-AGM meeting on thursday last week it came up again, actually proposed by the Russian delegate, suggesting KO after 7 rounds. When people present asked why it had been turned down earlier years, they were told that it had been sort of adjourned, since nobody knew e.g. what the strong players thought about it. Oleg Gavrilov from Russia asked for an investigation based on congress history of who had been the top 8 Europeans after round 7, the president and others said that this was not relevant. I guess it is a bit unfortunate if nobody has looked closer at the possible consequences of the proposed system in the years since 2006. It is certainly a bit surprising to me that Catalin is not among the top 8 after 7 rounds. One can also imagine unpleasant situations where one or a few non-Europeans are paired down so that they can not win the open tournament due to the KO rounds.

The four suggestions that were voted on this year were Martin Stiassnys proposal (Catalins favorite), Dinerchteins proposal only to cut down the size of the supergroup, the Executive's proposal and the KO proposal.

Of these, the Executive's proposal had the drawback that it entailed cutting down the thinking time for the majority of participants in the open EC in order to make room for a parallel closed EC to be played during the EGC. It seems disproportionate to me to make unasked for changes to the tournament for everybody, just to solve a perceived problem at the top. When it also became clear that neither Alexandre nor Catalin would play in both the closed and the open EC anyway, that proposal clearly had only drawbacks.

Martin Stiassnys proposal was the second most popular at this years meeting. However, as many other proposals it has the drawback of severing the top European players both from strong visitors from outside Europe and from Europeans further down the list in the open tournament. This is an aspect that clearly many of us don't like. Many feel that the open congress tournament is a very successful recipe.

Another contributing factor could have been that there were too many proposals (someone counted to 13) on the agenda this year, it would probably have been better to prepare things better by condensing them into fewer schemes.

To the Swedish association the Dinerchtein proposal would have been the second best alternative, but it didn't get much support in the initial vote. Still, it would have been interesting to see if many of those supporting the MS proposal would have preferred leaving things as they are, in a final vote against the KO solution.

The details of the new system are to be better defined now, including the number of qualification rounds I think. If it will still be felt that this doesn't solve the problem, maybe it will be time to look again at the idea of an open European championship at the summer congress and a closed European championship as an elite tournament some other time of the year?

best regards,
Henric

yup.



The problem is that the guy who maybe only beat 3 Koreans, compared to the 4 of the winner, just had no chance to win the championship because he did not get paired against a 4th Korean, even though he might be strong enough to have won. This way the champion gets decided based on who the pairing software selected as your opponent(s). That is not really fair



This is not that absurd. There might also be Europeans who are very strong, but don't go to the EGC at all, even though they might be the strongest European.

From what I understand what they will have just one Wall List, but use forced pairings after round 7 for the top European players. This way the strong Europeans will play each other.
The fact that they say that if a European loses in the "special" closed European games, he drops into the open tournament again, just means his next opponent can be an Asian player.

_________________
Laurens
Go school: freegame's Teaching School
Author of: The Next Move a book for 15-3kyu players.

Is it right that leaving the system as it was was not an option to vote on this year?

_________________
A good system naturally covers all corner cases without further effort.

Antti leads by 3 SOS points over Catalin so (in case the new rule would have been applied already) he would have been as much entitled to qualify for the final ko stage as Alexandre was entitled to the Championship 2009 by leading with 2 SOS points over the very same Catalin.

Cheers Tapir

PS
Just notice that in the current system neither of them has a chance to become European Champion anymore. Furthermore the chance is that there will be a unique European Champion this year (i.e. one winning the open competition as well).

Yes, that's right. I was wondering about it too because the old system was better then the new one

I can't find the British Go Association proposal anywhere (either here or other sites that had the proposals), did they select a proposal that was not in the given out before the meeting? I got the feeling the President (and chairmen of the meeting) couldn't give a **** about the system in the end.

I think Israel is at least a member of EGF if not actually European country. If this years result were used with next year system, would Ali Jabarin be able to take part in the last three round cup?



Well, if you look at the recorded meeting you notice that the whole meeting had "Amateur" label in it. I got the feeling that most people attending didn't have any glue what was going on. I saw papers being delivered at the meeting. It is unfortunate that the highest deciding authority of EGF is a discussion club.



After seeing that recorded meeting I have to say that anything is possible in AGM meetings. For example, they accepted the last years meeting minutes and then there was discussion about discounts to countries with few players. In the end the Secretary concluded that the officers have been given the right to accept lower payments from them last year, but that is not in the meeting minutes. Usually when important official meeting is held, the minutes are the outcome of that meeting. I know that there are meetings where the beef of the meeting is in notes of each members and ideas thrown out in the meeting, but AGM is a formal meeting and it's decicions should be clearly written in the meeting minutes.


Was it the actual Russian delegate or one of the other Russian members representing countries that didn't have a representative in place. I heard rumors that Russian members had 5 votes in the meeting (this information is secondhand so I can't be sure if it is true, the 1st recording is not perfect). If a member of EGF can't send it's own representative to a AGM meeting which is held in the biggest and most important event in the whole Europe, I think that country should not have any voting rights.

Thanks for your history lesson, it just underlines that the officers of the EGF don't really care about the titles given in the EGC. Maybe this is good since there was a lot of discussion about money and how it is distributed between tournaments so maybe the time they spend to other issues are more important.

What seems clear is that the actual proposals that were being voted did not all comply with the requirements of last years decisions. So for now on for any proposal to the AGM, the previous decisions can be thrown out and the best you can figure out is what you should propose.


It was proposed several times that there should be a vote between change and no change, but those were pretty much totally ignored.


About the system used in 2011, we have to wait until the rules comission gives us the details. Already we can say that non-europeans can and will affect on who gets into the knockout and also that there is a possibility that some european player can drop from closed EC to play in Open EC.

I may have missed some important step, and the proposal may well have been a good one - it did at least do rather better than Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest. But at present I feel something has gone awry.

Just before the European Go Congress, a very brief discussion flared up in the BGA's own forum, gotalk. The idea was to get some members' views for British input into the European AGM, and not just on this topic. There was very, very little interest shown. However, just before his departure, our European rep, Geoff Kaniuk, offered a list of his own views on a wide range of matters and said that this was how he intended to vote if it was left up to him. There was a smattering of replies to that, with some disagreements. Presumably Geoff took note of these comments, and also of instructions from the BGA Council which we were not privy to. It may usefully be added that Geoff is very experienced in go politics, tournament organisation and go rules, and has tons of common sense. He was, I'd say, an ideal representative, and I'd certainly have no qualms about him representing me.

Nevertheless, a couple of things disturb me about the process.

One is that very, very few Brits took an interest in the debate, and very, very few attended the congress (the number of Brits attending also seems to be on the decline). There is also no Brit currently involved in the European championship. I do wonder, therefore, if some weight should have been taken away from the British proposal for that reason. (That's a theoretical objection - I have no problems with the actual proposal.)

The other, which applies also to some other countries and to some other items on the agenda, is that too many items are being put to the vote without prior vetting or other groundwork. And the ambush tactics are allowed to work! Surely any major proposal should be sent out to other member countries some weeks or months before the AGM, not necessarily for discussion (i.e. extra work for the proposer) but to give other people time to mull it over, and so make a final vote more informed. As I understand it from the outside, this does indeed happen for some proposals - so why not for all? Is it poor chairmanship, different ways or traditions of doing council business in various countries, language problems, Eurovision type country cliques, or what?

Yes

From a formal point of view this was rather anticonstitutional, but in the previous message I tried to explain how it came about. And although it was UK that made the proposal at the AGM, the initiative was really russian this time (at the pre-AGM meeting).



Sure he would.



It started at 19.00 and ended at 2.15. It's the longest one I've been to.



It was the Russian delegate, vice president of the Russian Go Federation.



It's correct that many countries were represented by russians, at least Armenia, Azerbaijan, Croatia, plus a couple of more. The EGF constitution does not allow proxy votes, but in practice this is circumvented by saying that the person is a member of the country's go federation, even if not a citizen of that country. The constitution commission suggested either removing the ban on proxy votes or requiring citizenship, but the change has not been implemented. It is not easy to modify the EGF constitution, given the severe requirements on qualified majority.

best regards,
Henric

Can you tell me (an i guess also others ) what is decided (if anything on the other points on the agenda?


Agenda

1. Opening of the meeting

2. Verifying presence and voting rights

3. Accepting the agenda

4. International Matters:
a. Presentations from other International bodies
b. Appointment of replacement IGF Director
c. Report from IGF Directors
(WMSG 2012, International Referees, IGF membership)
d. Cooperation with EGCC
(Annual Reports publication (CZ), Appointment of Supervisory Board reps)

5. Acceptance of previous year's AGM minutes

6. Admission of new members (Latvia) and updates from candidates (Georgia)

7. Reports of the President, Secretary, Treasurer

8. Report of the Auditors for 2008-09 and 2009-10

9. Reports of chairmen of existing Commissions
a. Rules (adoption of International Rules?)
b. Ratings
c. Youth
d. Strong Players

10. Election of Executive officers and auditors
a. The nominations for executive (all proposed by CZ, DE, PL, SK):
Martin Stiassny for EGF President
Tony Atkins for EGF Secretary
Hans Kostka for EGF Treasurer
Jana Hricova for EGF Vice-President
Leszek Soldan for EGF Vice-President
Matti Siivola for EGF officer
Ales Cieply for EGF officer
b. Auditors:
Arnaud Knippel (?), Thilo Burkhardt (?)

11. Budgets
a. Approval of countries applying for reduction in 2010
b. Proposal to revert minimum membership fee to 50 euro (IE)
c. Proposal to change EGF accounting year to calendar year from Jan 2011
d. Presentation for Comment of Budgets 2010 and 2011
e. Proposal to report accounts three months before AGM (CZ)

12. Appointment of Commissions

13. European Go Congresses
a. Financial reports from past tournaments (CZ)
b. Comments on 2010: Tampere, Finland
c. Progress report on 2011: France
d. Progress report on 2012: Germany
e. Progress report on 2013: Poland
f. Selection of hosts for 2014: Russia and ?
g. Expressions of interest in later years (CZ + ?)

14. European Tournament Calendar - Selection of hosts
a. Youth Championship 2012 ?
b. Student Championship 2012 Russia?
c. Pair Go 2011 Turkey? and 2012 ?
d. Women's Championship 2012 ?
e. Team Championship 2011 Spain/Russia? and 2012 ?

15. European Championship System Proposals

16. Proposals from Members
a. Prizes at EGC (RO and RU)
b. European Professionals at EGC (RO)
c. Rating System only open for national Go association members (CZ)
d. President to report quarterly (CZ)
e. Top Players to vote at EGF AGM (RU)
f. World Cup selections (RU)
g. New Champions League (RO)
h. Situation, location and staff of EGCC (RO)

17. Any other business

_________________
Promotor and Librarian of Sensei's Library

Azerbaijan representative was from Azerbaijan this time, but you forgot to mention Belorussia and Switzerland.

I also think that it's a bad tradition, but for me it was the only way to vote.

_________________
Go lessons: http://breakfast.go4go.net/
Russian Go news: https://vk.com/go_secrets/

Ok, this is what I recall:


b. Appointment of replacement IGF Director

Martin Finke was elected, with the main task to look after the 2012 World Mind Sports games, which will probably take place in Manchester.

d. Cooperation with EGCC
(Annual Reports publication (CZ), Appointment of Supervisory Board reps)

It's a little bit unclear what happened here, in the sense that it's not clear how the members of the board should be appointed. At any rate, Catalin Taranu and M. Papazoglou (FR) were elected. The two positions are intended for representing EGF members. I think it is then important that the AGM should elect the representatives. That way they can help the EGF members to feel confident that the EGCC is managed correctly and responsably. If the supervisory board is just appointing itself there is the risk of a lack of confidence. I think this is precisely what has happened. But the meeting certainly approved of the two new board members. In particular Catalin seems to have many ideas on what the EGCC should do, so he will probably have a vitalizing effect.

6. Admission of new members (Latvia) and updates from candidates (Georgia)

Latvia was accepted as member, on condition that they set up selection procedures and procedures for handling internal conflicts (as required of new members by the EGF constitution)


10. Election of Executive officers and auditors

The Executive was re-elected by default.

b. Auditors:
Arnaud Knippel (?), Thilo Burkhardt (?)

A new auditor was elected, I don't recall her name, sorry.


b. Proposal to revert minimum membership fee to 50 euro (IE)

Proposal rejected.

c. Proposal to change EGF accounting year to calendar year from Jan 2011

Proposal approved.

12. Appointment of Commissions

As I understand it, it was decided that the Executive should start up the Strong Players commission somehow.

f. Selection of hosts for 2014: Russia and ?

Romania chosen, probably in Sibiu, see separate thread.

a. Youth Championship 2012 ?

Prague (?)

b. Student Championship 2012 Russia?

Confirmed.

c. Pair Go 2011 Turkey? and 2012 ?

Turkey 2011 confirmed, probably in Istanbul.

d. Women's Championship 2012 ?

Romania selected (?)

e. Team Championship 2011 Spain/Russia? and 2012 ?

Not applicable, the Team Championship format will be changed to qualifications on internet, followed by face to face finals during EGC.

15. European Championship System Proposals

Se separate thread. Knock out among top 8 europeans after round 7, or possibly different number of rounds.

16. Proposals from Members
a. Prizes at EGC (RO and RU)

Nothing decided.

b. European Professionals at EGC (RO)

Nothing decided.

c. Rating System only open for national Go association members (CZ)

Proposal withdrawn.

d. President to report quarterly (CZ)

Nothing decided.

e. Top Players to vote at EGF AGM (RU)

Rejected.

f. World Cup selections (RU)

Not ure if anything was decided, maybe accepted?

g. New Champions League (RO)

Would be welcome if someone organizes it.

h. Situation, location and staff of EGCC (RO)

Discussion. Nothing decided.

cheers,
H.