February 2008 BoD Board Meeting

[tdwg83]

Did I miss the section on foil bib or was it not listed? Or are they waiting for more information from FIE on the subject?

[edew]

Hmm....sounds like a fun one to attend.

[peet]

Regarding the Motion re: FRED and the USFA fencer data:

I'll answer any questions about it that you all may have soon, but I'm at work at the moment, and, well, they like it when I work on their stuff instead of my own while I'm here... (the nerve! )

Just sit tight, and I'm sure I'll be able to provide good answers to the above (and other) questions.

cheers!

-p

[peet]

Originally Posted by DJ Apostrophe

Thanks for the agenda. Some good stuff in there.

A thought on your motion regarding partnership between the USFA office and FRED...

What if the file that the USFA sent to Peet contained the following info:

USFA Member Number, Classification, Points list data, Year of birth.

Then FRED can be configured to have users enter their USFA member number. Doing so would then associate their FRED user record with the USFA data record.

No personal information is being sent from the USFA (aside from year of birth), and no data can be tied from the USFA file to any individual person without knowing that person's USFA member number.

Reverse lookup on the list would get you someone's member number (i.e. look up someone at Y position on X points list), but that isn't very useful...

Thoughts?

-w

That's a very interesting suggestion. It certainly would limit tho possibility of divulging private info.

However:
So far, I'd been thinking that one thing FRED would need to do is allow people to find themselves in the USFA list by name, club, division, etc., because people might not usually have their member number handy. Also, FRED allows coaches and parents to preregister their students/kids, and they might not have easy access to the student/kid's member number.

Still, it's an interesting suggestion, and it goes along a principle that we'd already fly by: limit the transfer to only what is necessary.

-p

[peet]

Originally Posted by dekko

3. Askfred. This one is touchy. I would have to admit I am against this only from the perspective that Askfred, for all the great things this website has done, is still unofficial. To have the USFA load official info in a syatem that is unofficial seems odd. I would be all in favor of a motion for Askfred to become the official repository for all non-national events and have it be official, then this motion would make seem applicable. But, to add official info to a non-official system seems weird.

I hear you. Sharing official information with outside parties needs to be considered carefully.

But if you think about it, all we're really talking about here is making information that tournament organizers need, more readily available. Since long before the internet existed, organizers have used fencer ratings, club affiliations, division affiliations, birth years, and points standings to conduct their tournaments. This proposal simply suggests taking an already widely-used system (FRED) and using it as a more efficient, powerful conduit for that information.

The USFA has made good steps in making some of this information available on the USFA website, but some of it is not there (for policy reasons): club affiliation & birth year. FRED could make club and birth year useful to tournament organizers without divulging it to unauthorized parties in a way that a simple web posting cannot.

-p

[peet]

The USFA's concerns & polices are best voiced by an official of the organization, but for what it's worth:

Originally Posted by Philistine

Is the concern that publicizing a NCAA member's club in the results of a tournament could be construed as the fencer "representing an outside team" in the competition?

Yeah, the reason (as I have been told) that the member listings at USFencing.org exclude club affiliation is because it could possibly threaten an NCAA fencer's eligibility due to "representing an outside team", as you say.

Originally Posted by Philistine

I'm not sure I follow. Is the thought that FRED will change the way it shows club affiliations in the future (or just formalize a policy)? I guess what I don't understand is why a more official USFA-fed FRED would be more of a threat to eligibility then the current FRED.

I believe the USFA's concern here is that since FRED's club affiliation information is (currently) unofficial, it is less of a threat to NCAA eligibility. But once FRED can fairly claim to displaying the official USFA info, then the threat could be greater, (and more to the point), implicate the USFA.

Basically, if an NCAA college dropped a fencer because of info that only comes from FRED, then it's no skin off the USFA's nose. But if the info came from the USFA (through FRED) then both FRED and the USFA could get in trouble.


Please note that my knowledge of NCAA policy is only what I am told by others, not from personal knowledge.

oiuyt would be in a much better position (in both USFA terms and NCAA terms) to speak to this.

-p

[peet]

[quote=dekko;659597]

Originally Posted by Philistine

As I understand it right now, by Askfred not being official, the two biggest ramifications of this are ratings are not affected and qualfiers for national events are not based on anything seen in any qualifying event, divisionals/section etc, by any results seen on there right now. Is Askfred accurate in this reporting, very likely, only as good as the data supplied, but not official. I do believe it should be and would hope that it can be but until it is it should be up to the fencer to supply the info for themselves. Not sure how having the USFA upload info to an unofficial site of fencer and tournament information would be useful. Again, is it were official, this is understandable but until then.....

Does this aggrement make it official? Not on the surface. If that is the goal maybe it should be spelled out as such. Allowing Askfred to have this info, not so much. Useful, maybe. Official, no.

I'm not sure I've understood your post entirely, but FWIW:

To clarify:
The motion presented suggests a one-way (read-only) transmission of data: From the USFA to FRED. No ratings or qualifications would go from FRED to the USFA. That information would take the same, USFA prescribed paths that they currently take (rating change reports from division officers, etc).


Now, off in the future somewhere, I could envision a FRED-like system that provided for two-way communication (with proper oversight and accountability), and I think that would be a great thing to work towards.

But for now, we're just talking about making the information in FRED more accurate, by feeding it directly from "the source".


-p

[peet]

Originally Posted by dekko

That's actually how I was using official in this case. Fencer X says to the national office I have new rating check Askfred under tournament Y, the national office doesn't care, they want to hear from the people who ran the event. Fencer X try's the same thing with a national event qualifier, national office says they don't care they want to hear from the tournament organizer.

I am all for Askfred and wish it were official and if that's the jist of the motion then seems a step has been skipped. Seems as though it would need to be recognized as the official warehousing of non-national tournament information, then a tie of information could happen, not the other way around.

Unfortunately it is too easy to make any kind of event results you want and Askfred would have no balance for that check. The division I am a part of just went through that very thing. I believe a balance could be found but until then, I could make up an event that showed any kind of result I wanted and give anyone any kind of rating I wanted. Until there is a system and/or procedure to prevent this kind of fraud and abuse, situation we are all in now, Askfred is not official. I agree it's rare but it's still out there.

I would hope it would become official then dump this info, not the other way around.

Ah, yes, I think you might have misunderstood what the motion is suggesting.

No-one could fake a rating into the USFA database via FRED, because it's all meant to be one-way. The USFA would still get rating change reports from division officers, same as they do now.

-p

[AllezCat]

I can't figure out Mr. Masin's motion about teams. "V.9.B" doesn't seem to correspond to anything clearly in the current Operations Manual. The motion seems to talk about how many teams qualify, but not clearly. Anyone know what the actual intended change is?

[KD5MDK]

It was pretty unclear to me how his proposal would change the participation in teams at Summer Nationals.

[KD5MDK]

It was pretty unclear to me how his proposal would change the participation in teams at Summer Nationals.

[Capt. Slo-mo]

It was thoughtful of Mr. Masin to provide a graph box of just how badly the US teams fell short of their seedings at St. Petersburg.

However; I think I can safely say that a lack of opportunities to compete as a team domestically was NOT the main contributing factor to the disappointing placement of the WS team.

[KD5MDK]

Do team captains turn in a performance report that says something like "We would have won the bout again Hungary, but the referee blew 3 calls in a row at the end. Our NATO allies retaliated in the next round." or "If Peter Westbrook had a faster parry 4 riposte he'd have advanced to the final round"?

[SJCFU#2]

Originally Posted by tdwg83

Did I miss the section on foil bib or was it not listed? Or are they waiting for more information from FIE on the subject?

As far as I can tell all of the proposed changes merely catch up with the July 2007 version of the FIE rules. The change to the bib was only approved in November 2007, and has yet to make its way into the FIE rules in final form (as of now the changes approved in November only appear in a FIE information letter dated 14-12-07).

[oiuyt]

I'll try to catch up with all of them, let me know if I miss something.

Peet has answered many of the questions, let me know if it's felt something needs to be added to his reponses.

Re: NCAA concerns. The NCAA prohibits student-athletes (edit: SA) from representing any organization in competition in their sport during the collegiate competition season, with the exception of their institution (and country, for international competition). They may only represent their institution in competitions which count against the competition limits for their sport (11 competition days in fencing, with some exceptions for competitions that don't count against the total). Outside of the collegiate season the SA may represent a club.

The work-around that has been developed is that NCAA athletes are to list their primary club as "unattached", list whatever their primary non-collegiate club (if any) would be as their secondary club, and list other affiliations as normal. USFencing treats affiliations (club and school) the same way they do representation for seeding purposes and will allow someone who lists as "unattached" due to NCAA restrictions to officially represent their "secondary" club when permissible and use that "secondary" club for things such as team participation.

This is very much a kludge.

Looking at how it actually works for a SA, it can get more complicated. Prior to the competitive season (starting mid-Oct or early Nov), the SA may represent a club. During season (mid-Oct to mid-Mar) the SA must either list as unattached or as representing his/her school. And may be required to correctly change this listing on a competition-to-competition basis. SAs from the same school may have to list differently at the same USFA competition, depending on how things are being done by that program. Once the season is over the SA may go back to representing his/her club.

The USFA's data management systems aren't particularly flexible to this kind of change ([/understatement]). FRED is, but it's still a bit of a pain. The open question is what effect, if any, would it have on eligiblity if results included a club affiliation when one isn't allowed? Sub-questions include what if the club affiliation were handled correctly by the SA and then mis-reported by the tournament organizer(s) in the results? What if club affiliations were reported with point standings, derived from tournament results that potentially include events where representations could be allowed, couldn't be allowed, or a mix of allowed and not allowed?

The USFA has chosen to avoid all of the potential landmines by not posting club affiliations on results.

And the whole issue is compounded by the fact that many SAs don't know the rules and that many of those who do will occasionally slip and list their club for an event during season. Or will list their school for something that shouldn't (or vice-versa).

The motion intentionally leaves it vague.

Originally Posted by BoD Agenda

The USFA shall work with Acetylene Solutions to establish policies and practices regarding the display of those members’ USFA club affiliations.

Rather than include nitty-gritty detail work in the overall motion, it defers it to being settled during implementation.

Really a lot of the questions need to be handled by having the USFA and NCAA talk and make sure that we're all on the same page. Whatever the results of those discussions are should form the basis for the policies used by USFencing. It's reasonable that anyone relying on USFencing information should be expected to also follow the same policies. Some of this was done a while ago (which is why we have the current policies for NAC/JO/SN results). It could, perhaps, be profitibly revisited, now that more is being contemplated.

While I'm writing, a quick note on the "trickle-down" motion. This might look familiar to some people. An identically-worded motion was presented (by me) last July. It failed on second-hearing in September with a tied vote (tie-breaking vote cast by the President on advice by the EC). We'll see if there's a different result this time through. Unsurprisingly, I still support this motion. Obviously for it to go into effect on time without amendment it'll have to be moved to urgent status.

-B

[KD5MDK]

For those confused, when Brad says SA he means Student Athlete I believe.

I noticed the identical wording and was intending to go back and see if there had been a mistake in which Board Member B had submitted it.

[DJ Apostrophe]

Originally Posted by oiuyt

<snip> While I'm writing, a quick note on the "trickle-down" motion. This might look familiar to some people. An identically-worded motion was presented (by me) last July. It failed on second-hearing in September with a tied vote (tie-breaking vote cast by the President on advice by the EC). We'll see if there's a different result this time through. Unsurprisingly, I still support this motion. Obviously for it to go into effect on time without amendment it'll have to be moved to urgent status.

-B

I hope that the voting members of the board will take into account that Summer Nationals LOST MONEY last year, and having the additional entries from the 'trickle down' qualifiers would have helped offset that loss (aside from crazy catering costs). Running our National Tournaments at a loss is a Bad Idea(TM) and having those entry fees would help with that. I wonder how many people got shut out last year by the lack of trickle down?

-w

[oiuyt]

Originally Posted by KD5MDK

For those confused, when Brad says SA he means Student Athlete I believe.

Yes, sorry. I had spelled it out the first time I used it, then abbreviated after that. I'll go back and add a parenthetical comment noting the future use of an abbreviation.

-B

[NotIndPk]

Originally Posted by oiuyt

(sans reports -- coming later)

-B

of the reports will we be able to see? (and when....)