COMMENT

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updated 17.5.01
COMMENT
For this page I am alone responsible. You can disagree with me in Open Forum. - rjh

ABOUT PAYMENTS
17.5.01
"Applications are now sought for this important post which carries an honorarium of £500 plus reasonable expenses."
     BCF advertisement 17.5.01, for the post of International Grader.
Some BCF jobs are paid. The Office staff are paid. The Grading Officer is paid. The International Grader is paid. I hope no Director is. If others are paid that I know of, I'm not allowed to say. But it does raise an awkward question.
     I'm not thinking of people outside the BCF. In the SCCU no one's paid; in the commercial chess world I suppose everyone is. That's transparent. I'm just wondering how the BCF would explain its policy to a Martian Board of Inquiry. Maybe it's market forces. I'll demand an Honorarium next year for running the Times. Bet you I'll get one, if I demand hard enough.

ABOUT GRADING
30.12.00
I've been holding myself in check, but I knew I'd end up by writing this. I am worried about the path the BCF is taking.
     I won't go into detail. I've already done that, a bit, in the Grading page 21.11.00. I'm more concerned here with the broad picture. Why are we changing to a hybrid system, and does the BCF's way of changing to it make sense?
     I think there are two main issues.

(1) An important problem last year was that many files didn't process properly, because incorrectly formatted. This was aggravated by the fact that the system did not always warn the operator when it had happened. Much delay resulted. On top of this the system's lack of user-friendliness, combined with the Director's unfamiliarity with it, led to a disastrous error in the print run at the end of the season.
     There were two possible ways of responding to this. One was to mend the system. Eliminate the formatting errors, and introduce some user-friendliness at the BCF end. The other was to throw the system away and revert entirely to the old system (which was less flexible and accurate, but the Director was familiar with it and he knew it worked).
     They've found a third way. Throwing the new system away was never an option, because it would have meant wholesale changes in the way local graders worked. So it's retained. It will still be processing the files (and they are working on the formatting errors). Inexplicably, having processed the files the new way, they are handing over to the old system for the end-of-season print job. This means converting piecemeal to a file format not entirely compatible, and throwing away the new system's advances in accuracy. (See the Grading page 21.11.00 for an explanation.) Last year's print job was a tiny part of the problem. To persevere with the rest, and destroy the system at the end for the sake of the print job, is an act of vandalism.

(2) Last year, Roger Edwards was ridiculously overworked. He has a wife and family and a job, and he found himself unable to respond promptly, if at all sometimes, to the demands of his unpaid BCF job. He can be blamed only for his failure to seek help. But his communications with local graders were delayed and sporadic, and this led to error as well as discontent.
     This year the BCF have rightly employed a Grading Officer, on something like a half-time basis, to take the load off his shoulders. So the Grading Officer is doing nearly all the donkey work now? Well, no, he isn't. He is doing some of what Roger did last year, and will certainly be doing important things Roger omitted last year for lack of time. But Roger continues to do all of the (new-system) processing he found burdensome last year, passing it on pre-digested to the Grading Officer when he's converted it to the old format. Why? We're paying someone to do this. To an outsider it's not clear that Roger will be attempting much less than he attempted last year.
     His need to communicate with local graders looks to be greater, if anything. In fact it's now a triangle, between him and the graders and the Grading Officer. BCF grading's a Committee job now. Sometimes a grader talks to Roger, sometimes to the Grading Officer, sometimes to both. Sometimes he talks to one and gets an answer from the other.

Somebody tell me, what am I missing?