ICCF 2015-015: ICCF Zonal Realignment
Michael Millstone, General Secretary
ICCF Zonal Realignment
Proposal
This is a proposal to combine present Zone 3 (NAPZ) and Zone 4 (Africa/Asia) into one new Zone (Zone 3). This will also require a change to the Executive Board composition as there will only be three ZDs versus four.
The new structure would be:
- Zone 1 - Europe
- Zone 2 - Latin America to include the Caribbean Islands
- Zone 3 - Rest of the World (RoW)
Rationale
Zone Structure
Empirical data shows that among active players with a fixed rating (5,077):
- Zone 1 represents 82.4%
- Zone 2 represents 5.7%
- Zone 3 represents 10.2%
- Zone 4 represents 1.7%
The number of isolated players (93) (active, fixed rating, and without affiliation to a Member Federation) outnumbers the entire Zone 4 population (86).
Leadership
Zone 4 has been languishing for many years, has received subsidies (free tournaments since 2008), and yet continues to deteriorate. The zone is unable to attract enough of its own players to host a competitive high-level Intrazonal tournament and have resorted to inviting players from others zones to help fill in the blanks. Membership has been on the decline and no plans or actions towards member or federation development have been prepared or implemented for more than 6-years.
In contrast, Zone 1 is now almost as big as ICCF itself. The annual zonal meeting is often attended by more people than attendance at Congress. The opportunities for high-level tournaments within Zone 1 are enormous -- and the remaining 17.6% of the ICCF population are left to cobble together what is remaining. Many of the European team tournaments and championship are very close to Olympiad strength and are free to enter for participating federations – that is, those who are part of Zone 1. The other federations are left with …
Organizing a large high category tournament in zone 1 with 36 active federations and close to 4,200 players is quite easy. Doing so with less than 100 players from 4 extremely small federations is impossible. This creates a very unfair 2-tier system, which again, is discriminatory.
Bottom line, Zone 1 is firing on all cylinders, Zone 3 is capable and is under excellent leadership and organizing some good tournaments, but Zones 2 and 4 are close to bankruptcy. In fact, during Congress last year, we did not have one delegate, delegate designee, player, or ZD from Zone 2 attending Congress to collect certificates or medals for players earning titles.
Geography/Language
While geographic groupings made sense when playing via postal was all the rage, with the advent of the webserver, geographic organization makes no sense. Another consideration was a common grouping aligned with language; however, Zone 1 is by far the most diverse among languages.
If ICCF were starting today with 50+ Member Federations, one has to ask, (a) what benefits do zones provide to the ICCF organization and (b) if there was a need/desire to divide the organization into zones, would criteria would be used?
Geography and language are no longer valid reasons for zonal structure. Zonal tournaments may be viewed as exclusionary and are discriminatory – a violation of ICCF principles.
Relevent Documentation
This proposal requires no change to existing documentation. The ICCF statutes only specify a maximum of four ZDs.
Only changes would involve some webserver changes to realign the Member Federations into the new respective zones.
Voting Summary
- A vote of Yes will means the Federation delegate is amenable to restructuring the zones to provide better and fair access to all players.
- Zone 1 will remain the same
- Zone 2 will cover South/Central America and include the Caribbean Islands
- Zone 3 and 4 will combine into a new Zone 3 named Rest of the World.
- A vote of No will means that the Federation chooses to remain grounded in an organizational structure based on criterion more than 50-years ago that has no basis or justification in the ICCF of today. In addition, the Federation recognizes that almost 20% of the ICCF players are at a disadvantage and excluded from participating in free high-level tournaments that the European zone can arrange exclusively for its members.
- A vote of ABSTAIN is not a vote but means the vote holder has no opinion and does not wish to represent the correspondence chess players of his or her federation in this matter.
Comments by Relevant Committees, Commissions, or ICCF Officers
Eric Ruch (EB)
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Jason Bokar
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Dinand Knol
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