Category: General

Hi All you RG65 folks

We hope that you are well and you are getting some good sailing in.

A bit of maintenance news.  We are currently moving our website to a new host, mainly to save us money.   Hosting the site on wordpress.com is quite expensive and we can save around 75% of the cost by moving it to a new provider.

It is a fair amount of work to move things over and there is a chance that there will be some small issues when it is moved, but please rest assured that we will get those issues resolved as fast as we can.

The most dynamic part of the site is the Forums which some of you are using, and it is here that we may see some issues.   Posts/topics made in the next few days will not appear on the new site but once things are moved we will try to replicate things again.

Thanks for bearing with us while we make this change.

 

Regards

Wayne

Good day to you all, and thank you for bearing with me while I have been dealing with some personal topics.   RG65 is never far from my mind but I have just not been able to put anything down in writing for a while.

I can confirm that Achille is making some great progress on a new draft of the RG65 Rules that will be opened up for review very soon.   He has received some good feedback from his initial group of Tech advisors and he is now converting this input into a workable proposal.

What we did learn from this process is that everyone has many great ideas of how they would like the class to evolve but as you can imagine not everyone has exactly the same view.  What remains very important to me is that the future direction of the class must not be determined by me, the ICA committee or the ICA Technical committee.   The future evolution of the class must come from you via your World Council representatives.

So for now we are concentrating to keeping the concept of the rules as close to the current 2014 Rules as we can, but converting them into a format which is modern, easy to read and understand, clear so that misinterpretation is reduced, adaptable to local requirements and finally and most importantly, a solid platform to allow future amendments and adaption by the class through democratic process.

So please don’t expect anything too radical when they are published for comment, but please also do not simply reject them because they look different.

  Something else that has been happening is that Vangelis and I have been encouraging the various Nations to sign up to our memorandums and we now have 17 countries signed up and forming our Founding World Council, and there are a few more which should soon join.   This is a fantastic take up and we look forward to working with you all to take the class forward.  You can see details of all this Here and if you click the map image above you can see how the call is distributed around the world.

It is good to see so many countries getting back to sailing after the last few years of disruption and I hope that all of you will be able to get some sailing this year.   On the ICA website we have a page where you can advertise your National Championships .  If you would like your event to be included then please get in contact with Vangelis using the online Form.

Talking about events, while 2021 will have it limitations, it would be good to see some regional, or international events taking place in the coming years.  If you would like to explore the possibility of hosting such an event then please get it touch.

As always, if you have anything that you want to discuss or bring to my attention then please get in touch.   I am always available and keen to engage with as many of you as I can.

That will be that for now.   Happy Sailing everyone

Wayne

Hello RG65 Stakeholders. I hope you are all well and getting ready for a season ahead, if you are allowed to have one in your country.

I want to keep you updated on what is going on behind the scenes with regards to the ICA.

As I am sure that all of you will know a proper functioning ICA needs to have a set of rules by which the ICA Committee must adhere, and this also extends to how your National Representatives work with the ICA.

The RG65 have up till now had a reasonably informal constitution and relationship with the class associations/groups in each nation and, while this has been OK up till now, it needs to be tightened up if we want to properly establish ourselves as a Class that attracts the best r/c sailors from around the world.

I, together with a small working party, have created a draft constitution which over the last few weeks was reviewed by some of you, and now it has been circulated to all the National Representatives for comment. We have already has some good feedback and suggestions for change.

It will take a few more weeks to gather this feedback and make the necessary changes before a 2nd review, but hopefully soon thereafter we can put the wheels in motion to have it formally adopted by the World Council. This World Council will be made up of the ICA Committee and 1 person from each country who are your voice at the ICA.

The process to adopt this constitution is set out within the constitution, but generally follows the following process.

• The interim ICA committee will announce the date of a Special Meeting of the World Council, giving at least 6 weeks notice of the meeting. Part of the Announcement will be a copy of the final constitution documents to be adopted.
• 4 Weeks before the meeting each Nation will supply the committee with information necessary to determine how many votes each member of the World Council will have
• Because any vote to do with a change to the constitution takes the form of a “special resolution” your National Representative on the Wold Council must consult with all their members and vote accordingly. So you all have a voice on this, and I encourage you to use it.
• At the meeting, because it is a “special resolution”, it will need 67% of the votes cast to be in favour for the constitution to be accepted.

I hope that you will accept our proposal for a constitution once it is been adjusted according to the comments from your National Representative as this will then give us the change to take on the next challenges which include issuing an updated version of the Class Rules and hopefully in 2022, at the latest, some International Events.

I must thank all of you who are supporting me, not only Vangelis, Achille, Andrew and Agustin who are my “Working Party”, but all those with whom I am having parallel conversations. I could not be doing this without all of you.

As always, if you have any comments of suggestions, please let s us have them. We are here working n your behalf.

Regards

Wayne

Hi Everyone, I thought that it was about time that I gave you a short update on what we have been doing behind the scenes at the ICA since I assumed the Chair in 1 January.

You will recall that some of my first tasks were to get an understanding of how the RG65 class runs in the various countries and at the same time try to set up a working party to help me develop the ICA further so that it better serves the RG65 class internationally. So what has been happening about this.

A few days ago I sent out a mini survey to all the National Representatives to gather some information about the size of the class in their countries as well as how it is run and operated, and then to gather their thoughts about how the ICA should go about establishing a working constitution and revised set of rules. We have received a number of responses to that survey and what they show us is that on a national level there are big differences in the size of fleets but also big differences in how the class is run and administered, none of which is a surprise to me. What we are seeing is that everyone wants to see some improvements in the way the Rules are set out and also that the ICA needs to be formalized through a Constitution but with differing views on what format that constitution and the rules should take. I am going to leave the survey running for another week or so and then will report back to you all with more details and then start to come up with proposals on next steps.

Moving onto the Working Party, I am pleased to say that we have some early take-up and so far we have Vangelis Simonides from Greece and Ireland, Andrew Cook from Australia and Achille Chatin from France taking an active part, with a number of others offering their services too. What I want to ensure is that the working party is representative of the whole world and so we are still seeking volunteers from North and South America, so please volunteer if you think you can represent those regions.

Vangelis has also volunteered to become our Webmaster and his first task is to totally revamp the website. Between us we have decided to set up a totally new site rather than use the old site as a starting point. Work is progressing well on moving all the content from the old site to the new one and we hope to launch the new site in a few days. The new www.RG65.org will have a Forum section for everyone to share and discuss topics and ideas and so once it is launched I will encourage you to sign up to it and use it. We will try to ensure that this forum is not used for any commercial purposes, and we ask all of you that are commercially involved with the class not to use it as an advertising platform for your business.

Thanks again for allowing me to take over the Chair of the ICA, and ask always, please drop me a line if you need or want anything from me.

I will further update you on progress in a week or two.

Wayne