The plan for the day

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Thursday arrives and it's sunny and warm in Seattle. It creates a strange juxtaposition considering Seattle's reputation.  

And a big shout-out to the DoubleTree SeaTac for giving us meeting rooms that have the same temperature as ice rinks. 

My plan for the day is to blog from these session: Basic Skills, Critical Issues, Standardizing Nonqualifying Competitions, Synchronized Skating and ending the day with Club/Interclub Presidents Open Forum. 

I'll also be tweeting throughout the day - my twitter handle is MEHarty. 

Here we go!

 

Hashtags

As I was starting my blog posts, I was trying to find something in any of my Governing Council materials that gave the hashtag to use. Maybe too many of my other conferences are highly social media savvy, so I'm used to having a hashtag shared well in advance of the event. But I couldn't find one.

So I created one - and I didn't just create it randomly. I went on the Twitter and searched the first logical hashtag of #GC2014. Unfortunately, some Global Conference is happening right now and that hashtag is pretty busy. I tried #GC14, but that gets me tweets for something called a "Global Conflict" which looks to be a women's all-star wrestling match. Don't think I want my tweets to be combined with those tweets. 

I selected #GCSeattle -since that's our location. I even sent a tweet to @USFigureSkating to let them know and explain why. I sent out my first tweet using it, and people have started using it. Unfortunately, I just saw a tweet from US Figure Skating telling the world to use #GC14, but I think I'm going to stick to my original plan. 

I'm kinda a rebel like that. 

The Battle in Seattle

(Blog post title credit: George Rossano)

The past two weeks leading up to Governing Council have been a battle of emails and editorials regarding the election of the next U.S. Figure Skating president. And it's only going to get worse in the next two days. While I've been to this rodeo before, I can't help but feel bad for the new delegates. They might never attend another governing council. 

And there isn't just one contested office. There's another board position, the Athlete Services Group Coordinator, that is being contested. We've had contested positions for president and vice president before, but a contested group coordinator position? This is a first. 

There will be a "Meet the Candidates" session Friday afternoon and I will try to blog it live and perhaps video record the Q&A session. The voting will take place Saturday morning and we SHOULD know the results by noon. I say should because last time we had a contested position, we had to vote multiple times. I think we voted three, maybe four, times before we had results. Hopefully, it will be one vote and be done and we can focus on other discussions. 

I'm back

My purpose of blogging is to bring Governing Council to those who can't attend. I write with my sense of humor and people can take it or leave it. All opinions posted here are mine and mine alone. I am not speaking on behalf of anyone else.

I'm sure TPTB are thrilled to see that I'm blogging at Governing Council again. They just love my sense of humor.

While Governing Council is an important meeting for the future of our sport, it is still just a sport. It will not bring about world peace and it will not find a cure for cancer.

That being said, this is going to be a very interesting meeting and I'll do my best to give everyone a flavor of what is happening. Most of the people attending care deeply about the sport and about our athletes, and they want to do the right thing. Most, but not all. The trick for the delegates is going to be figuring out which side is the right side to be on.

The politics of the sport will be on display during this meeting and I hope to play the role of Jon Stewart.

Hang on.