Leadership and Organization
First we must begin with the founding of Buhurt International. As we mostly will recall Alexander Titov successfully continued Buhurt League up to the World Cup. At that event during the BL Summit he announced his retirement from running BL. Those in attendance organized and voted amongst themselves a council to continue the league and the sport. The very first thing we said was that we were the “interim” (temporary) Council. And we would get the organization started and legally founded and then hold an Annual General Meeting (where all countries were invited to attend and vote) and have elections for various positions and the Board. Virtually any country was allowed to attend and participate; they simply had to choose to be involved.
A lot of the organizational structure was directly based on who was doing the work beforehand. For example, Stephen Slater was asked to be the Head Marshal for BLWC so it was effectively inherited for him to continue that position. I, Laurence Lagnese, who worked as the Head Secretary also inherited the job the same way. Xavier the Head of Authenticity was elected by the Authenticity Committee amongst it's senior officers before the switch to BI, so was also inherited position effectively.
The Board positions are all elected by the National Organisations -President, Vice President, Secretary and the General Director Positions.
The Committee Positions are assigned by the Elected Board. In turn the Board has asked that the big three Committees- Marshal, Tournament (secretary) and Authenticity all have a process for establishing their senior members and they elect their Committee head - who does not have to be a board member.
Please give the Committees time to get organized and structured so that they can establish policies and procedures.
2. Procedures
Some documents and policies have been created from nothing. Others were inherited from the Buhurt League.
The overwhelming majority of documents, policies, guidelines and procedures have come from taking the top tier of various categories and organizations and asking for their opinions and having discussions on it.
We also have had wide open discussions in the Buhurt International discussion group on various topics asking for opinions.
We have had various polls to establish various policies within specific focus groups of a given topic. For example we didn't ask a group fight, only the fighter for his opinions on buckler.
The process of changing or writing rules:
1. The board reviews and sees that a rule may need to be changed-
2. We send it to the committee and ask them to adjust/fix/create a new rule-
The committee works on that process and then provides it to the board for review.
The board approves and sends to national orgs for review
National orgs review and pass on to members for review
After feedback we possibly go all the way back Step 1 but hopefully we move forward
The rules get published.
We understand a lot of this did not appear to go this way. We believe that is due to the fact a lot of it is all new and it didn't get fully communicated to everyone. We were on a deadline for being ready for the new year with a new season with new structure in place.
The website has a ridiculous amount of coding and technical know how dumped into it. For free…. And that team needed as much time as possible to figure out everything but had to wait for rules to be approved.
In the future we should always have time for review and restructure.
The plan is if we see something that requires to be changed we will post an errata policy change. And then on each quarter of the year we will update the document that needs to be changed and it will have that mysterious ancient legend of a thing called “Changelog”.
Hopefully this helps clarify everything and how we are trying to do our work.
Laurence Lagnese
President
Buhurt International