ARA Meeting 7/29/24

ARA Meeting Minutes

July 29th, 2024

Open Session

Board Members in Attendance: Luke, Bichen, Dave, Nima, Edwin, Claire, Max, Steve, Aldwin

Working Groups Updates

Tech Working Group:

  • Demo of the player interface

  • Questions about audit trail and admin/superadmin status

  • Question about club leaders having to enter their own members, or if members may sign up and affiliate themselves

Outreach Working Group:

  • Socials are live!

  • Next outreach meeting August 12th 9 pm EDT / 6 pm PDT

  • The outreach group is discussing balancing fun vs. informative for its social posts

  • Discussion of the badge system for the club map, clubs earn badges for having e.g. regular meetups, educational classes, presence at a local convention, a ranked league, etc.

Rules and Judging Working Group:

  • The proposed WRC Lower Penalties Mod changes are drafted and in review, but at the whims of the WRC schedule, which is very busy with the new WRC pro system, online league, and other league initiatives

  • There was a European refereeing seminar that the WG will share when the video goes up

  • There are plans for an additional WRC hosted seminar for refereeing targeted at North American time zones and will be shared when the information is available

  • WG to work on guidebook and strike system in the meantime

Education and Resources Working Group:

  • Currently writing up documents on running tournaments, including tournament software and pairing systems

Other Business

Professional Organizations

  • No updates from Saikouisen nor WRC

  • Suggested to have information available for ARA to share for both of these to better direct players

  • Currently must be in the relevant discord servers to be able to access information, can we partner with Saikouisen USA and WRC to make basic information accessible outside of these discord channels?

IORMC

  • Organization handed off to Max

  • Roughly the same format as prior years, qualifiers on Sundays now as to not compete with WRC Online Team League

  • Signups posted ASAP

NAO Announcement: August 9th cutoff date, hotels will also go up in price if you do not book the block by then

 

Closed Session

Michigan Open Tournament Proposal and Top Cut Discussion

  • Option 1 – Top cut 4, everyone plays all hanchan, if ARA points go to 8th place with over 50 people, it makes the final 2 hanchan meaningful for all competitors

  • Option 2 – Lock the top 8 as 1 – 4 and 5 – 8 and have them play in their brackets

  • Option 3 – Lock the top 8 and seed them as 1458 and 2367 and have a two-game final

Board approved the tournament proposal and decided that SEMI may choose between any of the three cut options as they are all acceptable ways of doing a cut.

Other events: Last day to announce is September 1. Any remaining events would need to be the first or last weekends in October.

Special Bylaws Meeting scheduled for August 12th 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET

Next ARA Board Meeting scheduled for August 19th 5 pm PT / 8 pm ET