Gordon's GM blog #3

It doesn’t feel long since I returned from a short Christmas break in the Moroccan Sahara desert, which was most enjoyable apart from losing our car keys in a sand dune! Now it seems we are already nearly a quarter of the way through the year. One thing that happened early in the year is that I went to the European Bridge League’s seminar for National Bridge Organisations, held every two years, this time in Belfast. There was a host of interesting discussions, such as about the international cheating scandals, co-operation between countries, raising sponsorship, and research on individual well-being and bridge. But these events are also a great opportunity to chat to those from a variety of other countries, comparing notes and discovering similarities and differences in our successes and challenges.

A fair amount of my time this year has been taken up with preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation, which comes into force on May 25th. I’ve already mentioned this in my previous blogs and we contacted clubs and counties in January as planned, to provide them with information about it. The next stage will be for us to contact all our members to explain how we collect your personal data, where it is stored, who we share it with, and how you can go about checking and correcting it. The easiest method for us to contact you about this is by email, so it would certainly help us (and save the organisation money) if you would log on to My EBU and check that we have a current, valid email address for you, as well as using the opportunity to check that all your details and preferences are correct.

At the same time as we do this, we will be asking you to fill our a very short satisfaction survey. The purpose of this is two-fold: to give us a starting position from which to try to improve the service we offer our members; and then to allow us to measure to what extent we have achieved that by repeating the exercise in a few years and comparing the results.

Finally, our Funbridge Robot Games continue to be successful and we have extended them so that in addition to Saturday and Sunday, we now have a weekly Thursday game and extra games on public holidays. This means that over Easter there will be a game every day from 29th March till 2nd April, so this could be a good opportunity to try one if you haven’t already.

March 15, 2018