Blog 48 - Money well spent...

I thought you might be interested in a few developments.

The EBU created a charitable trust (The EBU Youth and Education Trust) a few years ago. The initial funding was increased when we were fortunate to receive a substantial three year donation from the Milton Damerel Trust which we used for an agreed project, which is the teaching of Minibridge to school teachers and their pupils, predominantly in primary schools.

This has been in progress now for well over two years and during that time we have trained many hundreds of teachers and pupils in the game of Minibridge and have made some headway in convincing education experts of the many benefits of using bridge as a method of making mathematics fun to teach as well as assisting the social development of young people. You may recall the front cover of our February edition of English Bridge which showed some young pupils from Tunbridge Wells outside the Palace of Westminster, before they went inside to play members of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Bridge.

History will record, although sadly not Hansard, that the youngsters won.

While this project continues we are also working, at the other end of the age spectrum, on getting some further evidence on the benefits of bridge playing for older people, especially in the area of warding off dementia. We have a very dedicated volunteer working hard with members of the medical and academic communities to enhance the knowledge that we have already gathered, which has proved sufficient to allow the Charity Commission to allow charitable status to the first bridge club in England, the Hitchin bridge Club.

I think it will be of interest to reproduce some words from the Charity Commission:-

"Bridge is regarded as a game involving a high degree of mental skill, being one of the components in the World Mind Games. Bridge involves logical and lateral thinking skills, planning, memory, sequencing, initiating and other high order functions and therefore, we are satisfied that it is a game which involves mental skill or exertion which, if played regularly, is a game capable of promoting health.

In reaching our conclusion that bridge is a sport or game which promotes health by involving skill or exertion, we looked at a body of research. That research identified the potential health benefits of playing bridge, and other forms of mental activity, among seniors in lowering the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease and other dementia by as much as 75%, compared to those who did not exercise their minds".

We are naturally delighted that the level of academic evidence has reached this stage but we believe that more evidence will allow us to further develop the argument that bridge is a healthy and beneficial pastime from (almost) cradle to grave.

Thus the EBU is working hard not only for the future of the game in England but also for the future health of our ageing population.

If you are interested in making a donation to the English Bridge Union Youth and Education Trust please contact the Trust at our Aylesbury office, or visit our dedicated page.

Blog 47 - National Grading System

After very significant background work by the NGS working party and testing of software written by one of them, I am pleased that we are now very close to being able to put the system into live use, probably by the middle of the year. We still have work to do in determining how to present the information at various different levels.

We have tested the software with real data from that collected via the Pay to Play process and once we are ready to go live, we will do some more testing with a few clubs, so that they can check the outputs from the system and make sure that they make sense!

If you are interested, please contact me at the first instance (barry@ebu.co.uk) . We are only looking for a few clubs, so it will be very much on a first come first served basis for trialling the software. There will be no impact at club level and no extra work to do, other than to check the results of grade changes to make sure they make sense.

As ever, the EBU would like to record their thanks to the efforts of its volunteers on the working group: Barrie Partridge, Paul Bond, Mike Christie, Peter Lee, Anthony Moon, Paul Habershon and Andy Kittridge. We must especially not forget the contributions of the late Dr John Carter and John Probst, who continues to recover from a stroke.

• Please view our NGS Overview document.

Blog 46 - End of year progress report!

As we approach the year end it is time to take stock of what has been a year of momentous changes for the English Bridge Union.

The era of Universal Membership started less than nine months ago. The changes for us all at our Aylesbury headquarters have been very substantial and we have got this far with minimal disruption to our clubs and our members. There are a few areas where we could have done better and we are working hard to make the necessary changes to improve our services to everybody and to deliver the best possible services to our membership. All of our staff have worked incredibly hard to undertake theses changes and are still doing so; I thank them for their past efforts and for what is still to come.

In the next couple of months we will be introducing our brand new stratified game results to our clubs that wish to use this new facility. The final round of testing is under way at the present time at about a dozen clubs and I would hope to be able to release the software for more general use in January.

At the same time the testing of the National Grading Scheme is taking place and I also hope to provide a substantial news release on this exciting new facility early in the new year.

Due to the very generous donations received by our Youth and Education Trust our programme of introducing bridge into schools with minibridge continues apace and with growing success.

Most of what I have mentioned relies on incredible efforts from many volunteers at all levels; without this input from our volunteers we could not be doing much of what we are doing today and we are very grateful for what they do for us all.

Finally, in these turbulent and difficult times, on behalf of all of my staff and myself, I would like to wish the very best seasonal greetings to all of our members and the very best wishes for a happy and healthy 2011.

Blog 45 - Update on NGS and Stratification

National Grading System


I am pleased to say that our volunteers are busy working on a "proof of concept" test of the NGS, using test data obtained from our P2P files. While we are still some distance from completing the project, if the tests prove that we are going in the right direction (things are looking positive!) we will be a lot closer to completion of the NGS project.

Stratification

Further testing of these changes is now being carried out by a couple of clubs using Scorebridge. If they are happy with what has been developed and tested so far then a further dozen or so clubs who have offered themselves for "beta" testing will get a chance to test the changes. Once we have passed that test we will advise other scoring software developers of what they will need to do in order to add stratification into their programs.

I would hope that we will have reached this stage by the end of November.

We propose to write an article describing how Stratification for our Clubs will operate so please do not send in lots of emails asking how just yet! One thing to note at this point is that using Stratification at your club will be totally optional.

Barry

Blog 44 - Master Point Updates

[May 25th: Update - Full Master Point detail now available in your own members area - login to see it]


Many of you are very interested in how the new master point process works, so I thought I would inform you about how the system works now we have Pay to Play up and running.



From Clubs:-


The scoring files from club games are sent to us, preferably immediately after the game, but often not until much later. These files are processed and then the session detail is associated with each members membership record and every member can (after logging in to their personal members area from the EBU home page) see the basic result detail for their session including any master points they have won. However, at this point the master point records are not updated to the members main totals. There a few reasons for this but the main one is that we need to allow time for scores to be adjusted as errors are found and corrected, something that happens frequently. We therefore wait until a week or two into the next month before updating the members actual record.


So any member can see and verify what they have won as soon as their club has submitted their files to us and be certain that they will eventually find their way into their totals.


From County Events:-


These arrive at the EBU office in different ways. Some submit in the same way as clubs and the same process as above is followed. This is by far our preferred route. Some counties are submitting the "old way" which is still direct update but this requires human intervention and is far less slick as a solution and these do NOT appear on the session records in the members area. They will, of course, appear on your Master Point record when we update them in the month following the county event


From Licensed events:-


We are currently receiving these in lots of different ways but will, later this year, be providing a similar service as for clubs for all licensed events.


From Simultaneous Events:-


We have made arrangements with the ECATSBRIDGE organisers for them to provide the EBU with an electronic notification of the points won in the overall ranking list. It is essential that the organisers are provided with your EBU number as otherwise your points will be "lost" as there is no alternative solution available. These points WILL NOT appear in your session record. However, please remember that points won at the club heat of an event will be awarded in the usual way.


Finally, we are aware that there are some changes that people would like in this area and we are working to do these as soon as we can. Some of these changes require ancient software to be modified and it is thus proving a little difficult to achieve, but we will get things done as soon as we can.

Blog #43 - Progress report

With Pay to Play processing almost four weeks old I thought it was time for a short update.

At the time of writing, around 560 clubs have completed their membership data upload to us in Aylesbury and are now able to submit their result files as they happen. I would like to thank all of those volunteers who have spent a great deal of effort getting this job done; the good news is that it will never need to be done again, plus we will always have an up to date membership database for you to utilise as required.

We have now received over 3000 result submission files; almost all of these have gone through without any issues at all and any issues that we have had have been very small. We have received some suggestions for improving the process which we will consider and implement where and when we can.

Once again, thanks for the hard work and your patience.

Blog 42 - Phew off we go...

So after a lot of talk, an unbelievable number of emails, a great deal of hard work by my staff and our incredible volunteers, at all levels, April 1st is the start of the Universal Membership era for the EBU.

At the time of writing we are still awaiting membership data from about 60 clubs who have signed up for affiliation, while we still wait for a decision as to their future from around 30 clubs. This clearly means that we will start the P2P process on April 1st with some clubs not quite ready to go....however we will work with those clubs to get them in a position to catch up - it should not be a problem.

We owe a huge "thank you" to the countless club volunteers who have worked with us to collect the membership data over the last few months. It is (or was) an onerous "one off" requirement; once complete it does mean that the EBU database will be of major use and benefit for clubs for maintaining their membership data. Also, thanks to so many of you for helping us with testing our processes before we go live; your help has been of great importance.

I am sure that many of you have been sitting on a plane waiting to take off and that we have all made rude statements to our travelling companions when the pilot comes on to explain the one hour delay and says "thank you for your patience", as if you have a choice! Well, I am going to ask for your patience in advance. We are embarking on something very new, for all of us, and changing the habits formed over many years. We are almost bound to have made some trivial mistakes in the process, normally because we have no idea that "such and such" does that particular thing - I have already come across my weekly allowance of such things this week and it is just Tuesday!

I hope that those of you who have a need to interact with our computer systems will see and feel that we have made strenuous efforts to make things easy. Once we get going we will be reviewing what we do and how we do it as well as reviewing the whole P2P process so that we can improve on it in year 2, where possible.

Some of you may be wondering what is happening to the "National Grading System". It is still our intention to deliver the NGS as soon as we can. Unfortunately this has been substantially delayed due to the illness and recent unfortunate passing of Dr John Carter, who had been leading this project since it started. He is a hard act to follow but we intend to fill the gap as soon as we can and move forwards. In any event, we always needed a considerable amount of "real data" in order to verify the mathematics that will lie behind the NGS and this will now be provided and available when we are ready to progress.

A reminder about receiving the EBU magazine, English Bridge. Our new members will receive their first magazine in June, as the advanced schedule of printing and distribution meant that we will not have had your details available to us for the April issue, which has already been delivered. All members will receive the June, August and October issues, which includes the EBU diary with the August issue. Thereafter magazine entitlement will follow the rules laid down in this document available on the EBU website - http://www.ebu.co.uk/pay2play/magazine%20points.pdf.


I must thank a number of people and groups for helping us get this far:-

Stephen Bligh (Scorebridge Owner/Author) for a serious amount of work he has contributed, in helping us with the data collection from most of our clubs and in making the necessary changes to his program which is used by the vast majority of our clubs.

Jeff Smith, who has also helped us along the right path with his advice and guidance and also his scoring software (which is extensively used by the EBU for our events).

Chris Stableford (until recently, Chairman of Surrey County) who authored a very comprehensive file structure for use in Bridge Administration (for the nerds among us it is called USEBIO XML), which we have used in our software development.

To the EBU Clubs and their members who have decided to go forward with the EBU into the future, mostly with great patience and understanding, all of which you will need to continue to demonstrate!

My staff in general at our Aylesbury office for coming to terms with a massive change in their working life, answering a serious number of questions posed by our members on the phone and by thousands of emails answered.

Finally to Michael Clark, who is our IT man and the person who has designed and written all of the software that will be in use after April 1st. His quiet, thoughtful way of doing his job has got us to where we are with a minimum of fuss and apparent bother. I know he has lots of other ideas that he will work on in the future, once we are past this watershed moment of "going live" with Universal Membership via Pay to Play.