Meeting with FIDE

As mentioned in this post, a couple of FIDE officials, Geoffrey Borg and Ignatius Leong, were paying a visit to Australia and New Zealand to discuss chess development in Oceania. The other reason for the visit was to hold an arbiters seminar for prospective Australia arbiters (in conjunction with the ACF), but that seemed not to have happened.
Wearing my PNG hat I caught up with them over breakfast today, along with PNG team captain Brian Jones. It was fairly free-wheeling discussion but there were a number of points I felt important. Geoffrey Borg stressed the importance of good management practice in federations, which is hardly surprising given his background in business management. He stated it best when he said "Just because you are volunteer administrators, doesn't mean you can't be professional administrators". His other good point was that federations who take a mainly hands off approach to chess organisation do not reap the benefits of junior chess. While a federation need not be intrusive in what it does, it needs to provide enough extra levels of activity to capture the players when the move up from 'schools' chess.
Also look forward to a greater level of visibility from FIDE in the region, with a Oceania Development Officer being proposed as a way of building up chess in the existing federations, as well as encouraging new federations to be formed.
Of course this discussion took place with the upcoming FIDE elections in the background. While this was touched upon lightly, it wasn't a significant part of the meeting. But from a completely different source (ie NOT from todays meeting) comes a suggestion that a third candidate may enter the contest. Who that is not public, and at this stage completely unknown to me.