Just a quick message to advise members that a revised "members area" is now live.
Especially good news is that we once again have the facility for members who wish to play in our tournaments to enter online. For the time being we are using PayPal, which is an internationally recognised way of making payments to suppliers. It is NOT necessary to have a PayPal account to use it, as the facility will accept credit cards in the normal way.
The new members facilities will also allow us to make further progress in the implementation of the National Grading System. There will be further details of the NGS and how it will work in due course.
You can see a brief video about how to make online bookings below, or jump in by going to the members area.
Monday, 20 June 2011
Monday, 23 May 2011
Blog 49 - Happy Birthday to us!
Happy Birthday to us!
The English Bridge Union has been around now for 75 years; there are only a few national bridge organizations around the world that are older.
A few weeks ago I was reading some obituaries of a few of the EBU’s illustrious bridge administrators and early elder statesmen. It is very clear to see how tirelessly these great bridge players worked to set up our Union in those early days. In the minutes of the 12 June 1936 it is possible to see names that now adorn our competitions, such as Lederer and Phillips, as well as seeing the immense detail they covered to set up a national organization, in those days without any technological assistance.
Over the last few years, the organization has gone through many changes – most notably when we changed to Universal Membership last year. It has been a challenging but fulfilling time to be involved in the administration of a venerable institution such as ours.
We are working on a few ideas to involve the membership in our Anniversary celebration year and I hope that as many of you as possible will join in.
I would like to wish all of our members, volunteers and staff a happy 75th Birthday.
Have a look at our special 75th Anniversary area, here.
The English Bridge Union has been around now for 75 years; there are only a few national bridge organizations around the world that are older.
A few weeks ago I was reading some obituaries of a few of the EBU’s illustrious bridge administrators and early elder statesmen. It is very clear to see how tirelessly these great bridge players worked to set up our Union in those early days. In the minutes of the 12 June 1936 it is possible to see names that now adorn our competitions, such as Lederer and Phillips, as well as seeing the immense detail they covered to set up a national organization, in those days without any technological assistance.
Over the last few years, the organization has gone through many changes – most notably when we changed to Universal Membership last year. It has been a challenging but fulfilling time to be involved in the administration of a venerable institution such as ours.
We are working on a few ideas to involve the membership in our Anniversary celebration year and I hope that as many of you as possible will join in.
I would like to wish all of our members, volunteers and staff a happy 75th Birthday.
Have a look at our special 75th Anniversary area, here.
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
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.
Tuesday, 25 January 2011
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.
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.
Friday, 10 December 2010
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.
Sunday, 10 October 2010
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.
Barry
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
Friday, 4 June 2010
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)