The AGM is mainly concerned with elections, about which the average player does not care, and adjustments to “rules”, about which the average player is equally unconcerned. It also receives reports. Fees and the budget are considered at the April meeting. Some participants trickled in after the start, and some left early, but the total shown as participating, at its maximum, appeared to be 67, which excludes the technical “host”, so really it was 68. My internet connection was lost three times, but I was able to get re-admitted okay each time, without missing any votes. The problem was probably my internet service provider labouring under high demand.

Elections

Director of Home Chess

There was one contested election, that for Director of Home Chess, for which Nigel Towers and Tim Wall were standing. In the interests of democracy, I conducted a poll among YCA league team captains, member-club secretaries, and YCA officers (about 52 people from memory), with an unsurprisingly low response rate. If you do not know the people concerned and do not care who does the job then you are unlikely to form an opinion. Tim Wall came out on top of my poll by 7 to 4. The support for Nigel Towers seemed more evidence-based, whereas the support for Tim Wall was perhaps coloured more by friendship or more distant person acquaintance.

As YCA delegate I had 2 votes (down from 3 due to the curtailment of the 2019-20 grading season). As Doncaster Congress delegate I had 1 vote. I had discussed how the congress should vote with the congress secretary. I also held the Leeds proxy for their 2 votes, for which I had no explicit direction though I knew the view of he who directed the proxy my way, so I followed that. I thus cast 5 votes in favour of Tim Wall. The outcome was:

Towers 168 votes, Wall 92 votes

Other Elections

All others standing in various elections were elected overwhelmingly or nem con.

CVs

CVs of candidates are interesting. They say the candidate did this and did that, but the reader often does not know if the candidate made a good job of what was done, whilst a few are in a better position to develop an informed opinion due the greater inside knowledge and greater experience than most readers in the relevant areas. Two CVs of candidates who were elected at the meeting had CVs into which I would inert the word “badly” at an appropriate point.

Rules and the Like

On-Line Meetings

The Articles were amended formally to permit on-line meetings, and the Bye Laws were amended to nevertheless construe “virtual” Council meetings as being held in Birmingham or London according to the prescribed venue cycle for these meetings.

Re-Election of Directors

The Pearce Commission some time back recommended essentially that directorship elections be on a three-year cycle, but that a given party ideally ought not to stand for a third term. The ideas are reasonably clear, but they were not embodied fully in the Articles. The NCCU had proposed more-explicit wording, and I had a hand in improving the draft version, providing a way for the previous incumbent to continue in the absence of another being elected. This was defeated on a hand vote of 15 for and 33 against. (I cast 5 votes in favour). The proposer did not press for a full card vote. The theory is that the Governance Committee will look at the matter. Some might say the Governance Committee should have been on top of this long ago, e.g. when the Pearce recommendations were notionally implemented.

Interestingly, International Director Malcolm Payne, who noted that it would soon be applicable to him, actually supported the proposal.

Direct Member Representatives

Currently a Silver Member could be a Representative of Bronze members, and so on. The proposal was that a Representative of a given category of membership should be a member of that given category. Apart from niggles like “what if the person upgrades their membership while in office, there have in the past been times when there have been vacancies, and allowing cross-category representative helps avoid vacancies. Since these representatives are elected exclusively by the members of the given category, they can decide if they want a representative from a different category. I cast 5 votes against this motion. A hand vote was 17 for and 26 against. The proposer insisted on a card vote, the result of which was still being awaited when the meeting was closed at the post-extension time of 6.30 p.m. (Delegates were allowed to wait on line for the outcome to be announced by the tellers, but I did not bother, as the dog was wanted to come into the room from which she had been excluded for 5 hours.)

Working Group on Safe Re-Starting of [OTB] Chess

The proposal from the Cumbria and Durham Chess Associations that the ECF direct the ECF Board t set up such a working groip was seen by those Board members who expressed an opinion as requiring the ECF to assume the role of legal and health adviser in an inappropriate and unwise way. I cast 5 votes against this proposal, though I shall not upset the likes of Mike Riding, Steve Westmorland and Tim Wall by explaining my own views at length. The hand vote was 13 for and 30 against, and the proposer conceded defeat without requiring a card vote.

Dates of the Next Season’s Meetings

The date for the April 2021 Finance Meeting was set as 20/04/2021, by Zoom, and the date of the next AGM as 16/10/2021. In London or by Zoom according to circumstances.

Steve Mann,

YCA Delegate to ECF