The Board met via Skype call to discuss several items of immediate importance.

It was noted by Kimmo that the incident (Nery WR attempt) that occurred during the pre-comp in Cyprus has been referred to the Disciplinary Committee. The DC has the ability to gather information, assess obtained information, and make recommendations without concern of being influenced by outside parties. See note from Kimmo (Aida President) below regarding the DC process.

The next item discussed was regarding the Team World Championships. Carla (Secretary) will contact organizers who have expressed an interest in hosting the competition and inquire as to the status of bids and offer assistance to compose proposals.

Vedran (Treasurer) will finalize a preliminary budget proposal for 2016 this week. The budget will be presented to the Assembly and finalized by 1 December. Vedran asked Board members for budget items related to their office and suggestions for funds needed for 2016 projects.

It was noted that candidates for the following Board positions (2016-18) should submit their declaration and CV to Carla by 30 October:

• President
• Technical Officer
• Education Officer
• Vice-President (following resignation of Robert King) one year term 2016-17

Carla will publicize the need for members to volunteer and run for office. The request will also be sent to the Assembly list.

The concerns and suggestions from members who attended the General Meeting in Cyprus have been noted. Many excellent ideas were presented and these will be implemented in projects in 2016. Suggestions for rules amendments have been sent to the technical office to be added to the rules update process.

The Board discussed priorities for 2016 which included:

• Development of an on-line judge CE/renewal course. Standardizing the basic judge course to establish consistency. Addressing issues and inadequacies in the current judge system.
• Refreshing and stabilizing the AIDA website
• Continuing update and enhancement of rules
• Budget for hiring a professional public relations and marketing firm
• Establishing a work group to improve competition procedures and organization on all levels from national competitions up to and including World Championships.

Message from the President regarding the DC:

AIDA DC has started to investigate what happened in Limassol AIDA World championships pre-competition. They started this process from my request. The process basically has 3 steps:

• collecting the information and trying to learn what happened (investigation)
• then conclusions based on the collected information and finally
• the recommendation for the Board for possible actions.

For the investigation period the DC has recommended that the judges involved with the incident in Limassol, will be suspended from the judge role (Ute Gessman, Robert King and Savvas Savva). Investigation may take about 2 weeks in accordance with the Disciplinary Commission guidelines:

“6. Timelines

Within 7 days after application of the case, the DC will confirm the  receipt of the mail and inform the sender which body will be handling  the specific case. Within 15 days after application of the case, the DC will decide which  level of action will be taken (see article 4) and decide and communicate  the expected timelines that will be taken into account.)”

Aida Board confirmed this suspension in the meeting that was held today and we will inform Aida Assembly about this process and also the purpose of the process: we need to learn something from this incident and improve as an organization so that this kind of incident will not happen again!

Disciplinary commission work is lead by DC secretary Katya Romanova in co-operations with the former DC secretary Claude Chapuis.

Best regards,

Kimmo Lahtinen, AIDA president