Tuesday 25 January 2011

Blog 47 - National Grading System

After very significant background work by the NGS working party and testing of software written by one of them, I am pleased that we are now very close to being able to put the system into live use, probably by the middle of the year. We still have work to do in determining how to present the information at various different levels.

We have tested the software with real data from that collected via the Pay to Play process and once we are ready to go live, we will do some more testing with a few clubs, so that they can check the outputs from the system and make sure that they make sense!

If you are interested, please contact me at the first instance (barry@ebu.co.uk) . We are only looking for a few clubs, so it will be very much on a first come first served basis for trialling the software. There will be no impact at club level and no extra work to do, other than to check the results of grade changes to make sure they make sense.

As ever, the EBU would like to record their thanks to the efforts of its volunteers on the working group: Barrie Partridge, Paul Bond, Mike Christie, Peter Lee, Anthony Moon, Paul Habershon and Andy Kittridge. We must especially not forget the contributions of the late Dr John Carter and John Probst, who continues to recover from a stroke.