Plea to the CS Directors

[Derek Howie]

Emails are not always the best form to communicate with, they can easily be misunderstood through the lack of emotion or body language, missed or are not delivered. I received a mail today via a third party asking why I had not responded to a mail, checking back over my mails (I have all my mails for at least the last 10 years, sad I know!) I had not received it. I can list a multitude of reasons why that happens. I would suggest that if someone has a burning issue, then pick up the phone to the person, speak to them at the next congress etc etc.

Andy, thanks for the reply. Yes, the very occasional email can go missing and emails can be misunderstood, but I don't see either of these as being the issue here. Emails are the recommended way of contacting directors, given that is what is listed on the main site. You appear to be suggesting that it's satisfactory for emails to not be answered as people can always phone or speak to directors instead. There are obvious issues with that. I'm disheartened by this response.

Not all directors are on the Forum, whilst I am happy to answer questions that I can, I don't think we can force directors to come on here. One of my predecessors was a big advocate of Directors not posting. Personally I think it is a good thing and it is good to see that Directors are happy in general to answer on here.

I can understand some directors not wanting to post on the forum if they are not familiar with this kind of communication, but part of all directors' responsibilties is to engage with members and as such I would encourage those who are uncomfortable or not familar with it to give it a go. I can see it only as a positive thing and improve CS as an organisation.

Delegation is a wonderful tool, for delegation to work efficiently you need volunteers to delegate to. Here is an example from just this year. I delegated a task. It was a fairly important task (and I refuse to go into specifics as that is unfair on the people involved), but it was not completed. There are ramifications for us because of that. Alex McFarlane has long suggested that each director has a team under them. I would love to see this but we are painfully short of volunteers (see arbiter list for a good example) and to be fair to them, looking at the way people who give their time to, for a want of a better word, chess admin, often become targets of people who don't agree with the way things are done but won't contribute themselves, do you blame them? (This may come across wrongly but I hope you get what I mean!).

I accept what you say here but I have seen examples within CS of where it can work quite effectively. There may be times that it doesn't, but that shouldn't prevent it being tried more. If it's just a short term project then I'm sure people are happy to help if a request is made, say, on the forum. I presume that you got more volunteers than needed for the Consitution project? That's a good example of putting out a request and getting people to volunteer. It can surely be done to a greater extent, particularly for the Directors who have a large workload.

Derek, there are a lot of frustrated members, non-members and directors out there. The biggest source of the frustration at the moment is the constant fighting. Solve that and everything else listed will resolve.

So you are blaming everything on the infighting? Sorry, but that's a cop-out. The two issues should largely be unrelated. Is what you are saying, for example, that Council members' names will not be put on the website while the fighting continues? CS has to be able to be a better organisation than that.

Andy, apologies if I'm misunderstanding your responses and do appreciate you taking the time to respond, but I'm feeling even more frustrated now.