Bigger issues--Long as usual from me

[Henderson,Eric]

Troy,
 	Didn't mean to open up Pandora's box. The initial question was asked "Could someone explain the rules change process?". My note was intended to just show everyone how long and drawn out the process is. It also has many opportunities in it for contribution. Sometimes the contribution helps a proposal and sometimes it does not.

It can take 4-5 years from idea to implementation. That does seem a long time to me. It's the same process for a small rule  correction as it is for a complete change in schedules. In the case of your schedule it might have been a good idea to do a re-survey, perhaps we should have gotten together on that. (Hindsight being 20/20 of course). The problem that you run into is that there is a drop dead date that the AMA applies rigorously and we never seem to have enough time to get it right. In your case was not produced in time to get an NSRCA vote prior to the AMA deadline. Looking at how things work we could have put them up for an NSRCA vote and sent the data in prior to the Contest Board "initial vote". (20/20 again)

When I wrote out the whole process it struck me that the NSRCA does a tremendous amount of work to find out what the membership wants and then those wishes run a perilous gamut. Just my opinion. It get very much like the popular vote versus the electoral college system. We could argue that one for ever - not an invite BTW.

The NSRCA mission also has the more recent addition of being an official AMA SIG. There are roles and responsibilities associated with being a SIG that also fall into the rules process. We can't expect the AMA to have staff to take care every issue of every competition class. So they use SIG's.  

You should volunteer to get actively involved with the next rule cycle. Believe it or not it won't be very long before we need to start working on 2008..

Regards,

Eric.
 



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