Blog #68 - The times they are a changing

The last Brighton Summer Meeting is now history.  Next year’s Summer Meeting is to be at the Winter Garden in Eastbourne.  During the next few months we will provide a lot of information about the new venue, the hotels that are available, the substantially cheaper (up to 90%!) car parking and many other things.  We sincerely hope that the new venue will prove more attractive to those people that have stayed away from Brighton due to cost, or other personal dislikes.

The EBU is facing, as has become usual, a year of change.  We have begun the process of changing our membership management system from one that is more than a decade old, and is at the end of it’s supported lifetime, to a very new and fresh system which will give us much greater flexibility in how we can serve our members.  We hope that the new system will be live in early 2016; for those who are interested the new system is called “Workbooks” and their website may be found at www.workbooks.com. We have also been testing our new members area, which is being renamed as “My EBU”; the test is publicly available at www.ebu.co.uk/members/v2. Please feel free to use it instead of using the members area.  We will be replacing the members area with the new link very soon.  “My EBU” provides far more information, including lots of extra detail regarding grading, particularly of team events, so it is well worth trying this out and at the same time, assisting with our testing.

As has already been communicated, October sees the advent of “EBUScore”, a rebadged version of Jeff Smith’s scoring software modules, after Jeff very generously donated the software to the EBU. This will be free of any licence costs to any affiliated club that wishes to use it.  Files sent to us by existing software in use by affiliated clubs will remain accepted as long as the club wishes to use it.

In the next couple of months some of our legal events are likely to get closer to a conclusion, although the legal system being what it is, we cannot be sure of how long things will take.  Our appeal against the way VAT is handled for our competitions has been referred to the European Court, as the tribunal here concluded that it was for them to determine precisely what was meant by the European VAT Directive.  We do not have a date fixed for that hearing at this time.  The second situation is regarding our Judicial Review of the definition of “sport” used by Sport England.  That hearing date is set for September 22nd/23rd.   The judgement for this hearing is likely to come well after the hearing.