Council News etc.

A draft agenda for the 2023 AGM has been published and can be found on https://www.britgo.org/history/accounts.

This year as part of the transfer to incorporated status, two AGMs will be held on the same evening, using the same ZOOM session. The structure is explained in the joint agenda for the evening.

Some little time ago it was realised that the way our current policies are presented is far from optimal. There was not a lot of consistency across them, and in many cases it was quite hard to separate the key policy statements from the descriptions of processes used.

An initiative was started to revamp the presentation of our policies, with the objectives of:

The notes from the Council's Strategy Day in September 2021 have been published at https://www.britgo.org/files/council/2021StrategyDay/BGA_strategy_day_2021.pdf

The minutes of the 2022 AGM have now been published at https://www.britgo.org/history/accounts.

A reminder to everyone that the 2022 AGM is taking place on Thursday 26th May at 19:30, as an online meeting using ZOOM.

The link to use to access the meeting has been added to the agenda and other papers on Accounts and AGM Page

As previously announced, the 2022 AGM will take place on May 26th by the use of ZOOM online meeting technology. A meeting invite will be created and published on the website a week or so before the meeting.

The Agenda, and accompanying papers, can be found in the members section of the website at https://www.britgo.org/history/accounts

In the November Council meeting it was agreed that

- Colin Williams would take over the Chair of the Tournaments Committee, following the resignation of Matt Marsh. Matt will still be managing the running of this year's British Championship
- Stephen Tweedie would take over the Chair of the Technical Committee from Colin

Handover sessions are being arranged, and committee members should hear from the new Chairs reasonably soon.

The short Annual General Meeting of the British Go Association was held at 20:00 on the Saturday evening of the British Go Congress in Cambridge.

The President, Roger Huyshe, chaired the meeting and, in his report, thanked Paul Barnard and John Collins who had stepped down from the roles of Membership Secretary and Online Committee Chairman, both after several years. He also stated that player development had taken a backseat due to DeepMind’s AlphaGo matches, but this year training sessions were being planned for the autumn.

The membership accepted his and the other officers' reports (including that of new Membership Secretary Chris Kirkham) and on the recommendation of the auditor, Pat Ridley, approved the accounts for 2016. These showed a surplus thanks to DeepMind sponsorship and the omission of a strong player training day.

The Council were re-elected with Richard Wheeldon replacing John Collins.

A summary of the AGM will be sent to all Association members in the next Newsletter and full minutes posted in the Members' Area in due course.

Like some other sports organisations we have decided to initiate some British Go Association awards in order to encourage players and organisers. We have selected the following categories for this year:

• Player of the year
• Club of the year
• Loss of the year (of a game)
• President’s award for services to Go.

Your nominations in each category are solicited by 31st December 2014 with a citation of a maximum of 150 words supporting the nomination.

Following this there will then be a vote for Player of the Year amongst the membership to determine the winner. If there are more than three nominations in this category Council will choose three to participate in the subsequent voting.

The winner in the second and third categories will be determined by Council from the nominations received.

The President’s award may be given to someone who has given many years or service or to someone who has done something special this year.