23 February 2020

FIDE's Social Commission 2019?

Let's combine Spectating the 90th FIDE Congress? (which starts in a few days) with the ongoing series on The Sociology of Chess (November 2016) and see what we get. In my previous report, FIDE's Social Commissions 2018 (December 2018), I speculated,

As I noted in a recent post, FIDE Commissions 2018, the two commissions (SAC & SPC) appear to have been merged sometime after the 89th Congress. Nothing is mentioned in the 'List of Decisions of Q4 2018 Presidential Board (November 2018)', and I could find no confirmation anywhere else. I hope that their work will continue in some form or other. They provide a ready answer to the question asked by many outside the chess community: 'What use is chess in the grand scheme of everyday life?'

Just a few days ago, in FIDE Commissions 2020, I discovered,

Three commissions have apparently been silent. [...] As for the Social Commission (SC), I suppose we'll find out more during the 90th Congress.

Have we gone from two social commissions to one social commission to zero social commissions? For SC, FIDE's 'Commissions' page lists...

  • Chairman: Zarnicki, Pablo
  • Honorary Chairperson: Marinello, Beatriz
  • Secretary: Klerides, Paris

...plus four councillors and 11 members. WIM Marinello was formerly the chairperson of the Social Action Commission (SAC), the more visible of the two previous social commissions. In the absence of anything substantive to discuss, let's revisit FIDE's main social media pages:-

The first two pages, which parallel each other, are far more informative than the last time I looked at them. As for LinkedIn, I no longer spend much time there and the FIDE page doesn't convince me to reverse that habit, although it did mention some business news, like the Coca-Cola partnership, that the other two pages didn't mention.

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