Spectating the 89th FIDE Congress

I was starting to wonder whether the recent change in top-level FIDE management -- see In with the New! (October 2018; on my World Championship blog) -- meant that FIDE communication with the outside world would cease. Then FIDE released a number of documents with reports from the 89th FIDE Congress which took place in Batumi (Georgia), 3-5 October 2018:-

• 2018-12-13: 89th FIDE Congress: General Assembly Minutes and Annexes
• 2018-12-13: 2019 FIDE Budget

Now I can do a series of posts like I did last year, when I covered the following topics:-

• 2017-11-21: Spectating the 88th FIDE Congress, incl. summary of 2016
• 2017-11-22: 2017 FIDE Congress : Whither the World Championship? (also from my World Championship blog)
• 2017-11-26: FIDE's Social Commissions 2017
• 2017-12-12: FIDE's Journalist Commission 2017
• 2018-01-04: FIDE's Anti-Cheating Commission 2017
• 2018-01-11: FIDE's Ethics Commission 2017
• 2018-01-25: FIDE's Marketing Committee 2017

The first challenge is that a number of commissions have changed names or have morphed into something else. I'm still trying to figure out exactly what has happened and will report on the various changes in future posts as I address specific topics.