First Australian FIDE Arbiters Seminar

The Box Hill Chess Club in Melbourne will be hosting the first FIDE Arbiters Seminar held in Australia, later this year. It will be over 4 days, from the 5th to the 8th of August (alongside the Oceania Seniors Championship at the same venue).
This will be the first seminar held in Australia, and attendance, plus passing the seminar exam, is now part of the requirements to become a FIDE Arbiter.
Now while some participants will be attending the seminar as a way of getting formal arbiter qualifications, there are of course other reasons for doing the course. The most obvious one is to simply receive some formal training in being an arbiter. I would hazard a guess that most arbiters in Australia, including almost all IA's, picked up their knowledge on the fly, as there have been very few arbiter seminars held in the past. Certainly my own experience was a combination of reading the rule book, and then running a number of tournaments. I picked up some tips from other experienced arbiters (eg Cathy Rogers and Stewart Reuben) but the only course I did was 3 years ago, when I had already been an arbiter for 20 years.
Now I don't know how many people plan to do the course, but I hope that it will be a sizeable number, especially given the difficulty that clubs and associations have in finding people to direct their tournaments. As I've pointed out in the past to plenty of people is that arbiting isn't hard, it just requires some knowledge and a bit of self belief. I expect this course to teach both.

(*Disclaimer: I will be a paid instructor for this course)