Things that went poorly

 The 2021 FIDE General Assembly was held last night (starting at midnight my time), and the Papua New Guinea Chess Federation had 2 important motions on the agenda. That was until I logged into the voting system to discover that our 2 motions had been listed as a single motion for voting purposes. This was of course done without the knowledge of the PNGCF and attempts to get it fixed were unsuccessful. 

The main issue with this (apart from arbitrarily changing properly submitted motions) was that both motions had different chances of success. While we expected one motion to be defeated, we had high hopes that the second would be passed. And I was planning to make this point when called upon to speak.

Then the second problem arose. Despite using my headphone/microphone setup all through the FIDE Commission meetings, it chose this moment to break. So instead of me putting forward the PNGCF reasoning behind both motions, the congress was reduced to watching me play a round of charades ('First word - Microphone', I nod my head, 'Second word begins with F', I nod more vigorously). However, at the same time, the online voting system used for the Congress also broke. So I am trying to fix my mic, and number of people are telling the congress what a stupid motion it is, and no one can vote on it (or a number of other motions). 

So the meeting moved on, and about an hour later, the voting system was fixed (I assume it was an issue with access to the service provider). When the vote was then called, the FIDE exec made it quite clear they did not support the PNG proposal, while former FIDE VP Georgios Makropoulos went as far as to say that such motions should not even be allowed on the agenda, unless the FIDE Exec support them (The FIDE President did tell him he was wrong on this btw). Despite suggestions from the floor that the vote on this shouldn't even be counted, there was a surprisingly high number of votes (41) in favour of our motion, with around 69 against (There was a very low turnout for the congress). 

Unfortunately, the decision by FIDE to have this under a single vote meant that the second proposal did not even get voted on, which based on the numbers, might well have got up.