Dear British Othello enthusiasts
The Annual General Meeting of the British Othello Federation (BOF) took place 2 weeks ago online for the first time in our 40 year history. Othello has been played on the internet since the late 1990's, so 20-25 years late doesn't feel like we are lagging too far behind the times!
Committee elections took place and there was some movement this year. Helen Dexter took up the position of Secretary and we were joined by two new committee members David Hand and Steven Rowe. Both of whom stepped up to take on some important responsibility planned for this year.
David has taken up the role of the BOF's representative to an exciting new venture spearheaded by the World Othello federation (WOF). The WOF is teaming up with online gaming platform Vint.ee, to provide an online gaming service that all national federations can tap into to organise online tournaments both friendly and competitive. Allowing the BOF to challenge other nations to online team competitions and continue our quarterly social tournaments on this platform. We will follow up with more information and how to get involved when we have it.
Steven has offered to lead the charge in a review of our constitution to make sure that it is fully enabling for the BOF to support our members and fit for purpose in the age of online general and committee meetings. We're also doing this with our friend Kevin Ruby of the US Othello Association who we caught wind was up to the same thing. We agreed it would be mutually beneficial to keep pace with each other and benefit from the ideas that are generated by both nations to improve the overall outcome for both.
If you have any suggestions relating to our constitution please feel free to reach out to britishothellomembership@gmail.com. The closing date for suggestions as part of the initial review is the 25th of March. So get reading quick!
It wasn't all business, we had some fun too, braking up proceedings with a few Othello based puzzles (one of which can be found in the previous blog post), we used a voting app to submit attendee answers as well as vote on motions and elections. So we all enjoyed ourselves and hope more of you will consider attending next years!
On the topic of frequency the committee voted to confirm the motion to hold our next AGM in the summer of 2022, which is when we would normally have held such an event (at the same time as our National tournament). The only reason the AGM was at such an odd time this year was because due to the pandemic we hadn't got ourselves organised to hold one in 2020. So we were long overdue!
Wishing you all well.
David Beck
Chairman