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"some people have quit, as you well know"
who? (i don't know.)
Why don't you ask Catalin? :)
Huh? As you are reading the list and supposedly know, why aren't you telling us?
In the letter, taranu complains about secrecy. Thanks to a polish site we know that but weren't supposed to. I remain somewhat unimpressed.
This seems unwarranted, for as this letter noted, a strategic platform is to come. We can assume that the agenda for the annual general meeting, which is always published publically, will contain this information alongside the official notice of his candidature. In any case, the letter was sent to all the national associations to announce and discuss, which seems perfectly normal.
The notion that the candidature was supposed to be secret is hilarious. In fact the polish intro explicitly states, he approved (public) publication. Primary audience will inevitably be the small world of volunteers in EGF member federations, so he sent it to a dedicated mailing list first, that doesn't exactly make it a confidential letter.
I'm not saying his candidature is kept in secret. I'm saying Catalin is mostly operating in the same atmposphere of closed communication as the EGF, which is one of his major complaints. Only because a Polish mailing list has published the letter, the rest of the community knows about this.
I have a lot of sympathy for Catalin. He made it as a professional and went on to feed his experiences back to the community, be it mostly the Romanian one.
My point is that, when professionals turn into missionaries of the game, they should expand their communication.
I fully understand that young aspiring players, like currently Pavel Liso or Ali Jabarin, focus on their personal development and don't care about the community. That's the stuff great players are made of: they can't be derailed by online or offline communities, save a few fellow prodigies with whom they can discuss at equal level or develop a rivalry. There are a few exceptions, like Benjamin Teuber and Antti Tormanen, who have kept a greatly appreciated diary of their internships abroad. The very act makes me doubt their full attention to becoming an expert. They seem to share that extraversy with the rest of us publishers, a need to communicate with the crowds, which will always swallow a part of their mind.
When you shift from personal to community development, the whole attitude needs a change. Then is the time to embrace L19, SL and whatever community is out there on the web, not to mention the face to face events like tournaments and clubs. I've been a club founder and have presided our national association for two years. I drove around the country to visit clubs. I established online platforms. I communicated with other national bodies and transmitted the outcome to our members.
These days I'm still part of the "midfield", be it only online. And I have to learn about Catalin's candidature through an obscure Polish site, thanks to deshi Liso who updated the tournament page. This is wrong.
I understand your point, but it still seems slightly misplaced to me. You should realise that it is wrong to call go.art.pl obscure, it is a big website for the polish community. You should also realise that this was not the only national federation to publish the letter for its community. Perhaps you could ask the Belgian federation why they didn't publish it, or communicate any information about it to you. The answer might be instructive, and it might address your complaint. I think that this initial letter is actually sent to the right target, although perhaps it could have also appeared on the new EGF forum.
Yes you are right. The blame is not with Catalin. I retract my point and am willing to remove this from his homepage.