[isabel]

Hi everyone,

Well, less than 24 hours after the Quebec Finals, our CDs are already starting to talk dates for next year! I love this enthusiasm!

See this.

We have been thinking about the date conflicts that happened this year. There were 10 Ontario pilots coming to Quebec this summer and 15 Quebecers going to Ontario. A recurring comment has been that next year a lot more people want to travel to each other's circuits... so obviously we need to pay attention to this idea.

I was wondering what would people think of the following idea. Could we assign alternating weekends as either "Available to Ontario" or "Available to Quebec"? This would give a lot of date choices to everyone, simplify the scheduling a lot, and avoid any conflicts. It would also garantee that no 2 Ontario contests would be held in a row, and same thing in Quebec. Of course if a weekend is not picked up by its province, it would be available to the other province. I think this would work well with the NC schedule as well. We could use the date planned for the Nats as a starting point.

What do you guys think?

Isabel

[craigk]

Well, we have not yet had an official request for the 2009 Nats that I am aware of, although there is a lot of discussion of having the Nats on the first weekend of August.

This has been the NOIC weekend.

There are also discussions within Northern Ontario Zone for that weekend to be the Zone Fly In also at Cambrian field.

Clearly, we need to start the planning process early and setting a program in place to coordinate Quebec, Ontario, NE REgion and NC Region events will be most helpful.

[Ray]

Thanks to our club Bross-Air for their enthusiasm and help. This contest would have been no where near the succes it was without their help. They did most of the work.

Nine out of twenty five contestants were from Ontario. Thanks to our friends from Ontario. Last but not least; Un gros Merci pour notre gang du Quebec.

I think alternating week-end idea bound to boost the attendance up, and create more enthusiasm for Imac both in Quebec & Ontario.
This year we started the contest season in May in Ottawa.
Some were concerned with the early start, but it all worked out well.
I heard from some of the contest directors that we probably have our usual number, four contests here in Quebec. Some would like to have one more and bring up the number to five. In any case, I propose to start the 2009 season like this year, sometime in May so that we can nicely distribute all these contests.
It would also be nice if we could take some of the closer US contest in to account.
Ray

[Rick Kroeze]

The every other weekend things sounds gound but gets complicated quickly when you fold in the rest of the North Central and North East region contests to ensure no conflicts with those as well.

It is geat to look early like this so that things can be worked out.

[isabel]

Yes, that's true Rick, so here's what I had in mind. It kind of looks like Ontario has been doing that once every 2 weekends already though, and last summer that's pretty much how it worked (alternating QC/Ontario) and it seemed to go over pretty well... do you remember if that schedule had worked well with the rest of NC? Do you know how the NC schedule is picked?

I was thinking if you imagine Ontario/Quebec/NC-US/NE-US as the four corners of a square, and you make it so NC-US/Quebec are "even" weekends, then Ontario/NE-US are "odd" weekends, it would work out well (not likely that a QC pilot would go to a NC-US contest, or that a Ontario pilot would go to a NE-US contest) it would all work out fine, and then I was thinking that Ontario and NC-US already seem to alternate, and that NE doesn't have a plan yet, so if we think about this in advance we could probably convince them to work along with us (NE-US are pretty keen to synchronize their schedules with QC).

Blah it all sounds pretty complicated the way I wrote it down but I hope I get my idea across. In practice it would be simple to implement and I think it would work.

The idea would be to encourage supporting your own region as well as supporting the "Canada" scene. I think this could only be good for everybody?