Is there a list anywhere of members with current tournament director certifications?
Thanks Tim - I knew it had to be in there somewhere.
And it’s only 3 1/2 years behind…as of December 2003. 
I think the data itself is up to date, a header inside each file says May 31, 2007. I updated the index page.
There should be a club TD list, though. At one point the idea was to fold that into MSA, so people could search for a senior TD in Oklahoma, for example.
The page is headed “List of Active TDs as of May 30, 2007.”
Hey, I’m a senior TD in Oklahoma. 
Seriously, though, what’s the idea behind this? If you don’t have contact information, it doesn’t seem useful.
Alex Relyea
One problem with including contact information is that many TDs may not want that information posted on the Internet, and doing so would appear to violate our privacy policy. (That’s another reason why we’re in the process of adding support for a ‘public contact’ field as part of a member’s record.)
If someone thinking about running an event in Oklahoma big enough to require a senior TD doesn’t know you, or doesn’t know how to find someone who knows you, methinks they’ve got bigger problems ahead.
I checked up on a newly minted LTD and she did show up. I think your date is correct.
BTW, members can now update the aforementioned ‘public contact’ field using the Address Update form on the [old] Members Only page, secure.uschess.org/MembersOnly
TDs and USCF Delegates are encouraged to add public contact information to our records.
Mike maybe this is a service that the USCF should offer. Sort of like if you want to contact an author of a book you send a letter to his or her publisher and it gets forwarded. The USCf has the Delgate contact info, TD contact info etc and initial contact goes through the USCF, then if the contactee wishes to they can establish more direct contact.
Since tournaments are the life blood of the USCF, and TDs are necessary for them, it seems that the USCF should make it easier for potential tournament organizers to find TDs. Maintaining the Oklahoma list of TDs on the state chapter’s website is tedious, due to the USCF not having a current (or even recent) published list that includes Club TDs. The effort is probably duplicated by some other state chapters around the country.
If the USCF would make available current lists of all TD’s names by state and certification level, including Club TDs, it would be very helpful for organizers. Knowing the TD names will at least let them know who they need to find contact info for. Using the phone book or calling mutual chess friends should allow contact with little additional effort and no concerns for the USCF about giving out contact info.
Cheers,
Mike Swatek
Another Oklahoma Senior TD 
Privacy rules tend to be a good thing, except when they create problems trying to do other good things.
I know of some situations in which an organizer in search of a properly qualified TD contacted the USCF office, and the office in turn contacted some TDs in the area and suggested they contact the organizer.
Having some kind of public contact database that is exempt from the USCF’s privacy policy seems like the best long-term solution here. (We may still want some restrictions on access to that information, so the spam harvesters can’t mine our data.)
Joan’s out of the office for the National Open, when she gets back I’ll ask how she generates/updates the NTD/ANTD/Senior/Local lists and see if we can get a club TD list added to the group.
Since a member’s current TD Certification status is part of the data in the MSA database, couldn’t the page listing TD’s be rendered dynamically by having the web page request run a query against the MSA database? If so that would insure that the list is always current and captures all levels of TD’s (or the requestor’s desired level only, possibly), with no effort (after the initial programming of the web page request and output, of course) required on the part of USCF staff to maintain such a list.
But I’m not a professional web designer/programmer so maybe I’m missing something here.
That’s somewhere around #83 on my list, though I still think adding public contact information to such a list or server is a good idea.
It might also be desirable to show how active the TD is. We have some NTDs who haven’t personally directed an event in many years.
Dynamic lists have the advantage of always being up-to-date, they have the disadvantage of increasing the load on the server.
Mike,
I think what you’re saying is not only is dynamic generation of the page doable, it is how you would probably prefer to implement it (with perhaps a reservation about additional server load), but it is not as high a priority as other things you’re working on (and I can certainly understand that).
I like the idea of including an indication of recent directing activities, and the idea of public contact information.
FIDE tried that for a while on the IA list, but they seem to have stopped updating it in 2005.
Yes, I am DEFINITELY in favor of doing things once (ie, writing a dynamically updated page or one that is automatically updated once a day like the unofficial Grand Prix standings) as opposed to having something that staff has to do manually over and over again.
There are some advantages to daily updates over dynamic ones, having to do with where and when the page is built (on the USCF server during the daily reporting cycle or at the website on request), but sometimes dynamic pages are better than daily updated static ones, too, it depends on the specific application and how much time it takes to regenerate the page each time. (The Grand Prix lists take 4-5 minutes to update each day, for example, because it has to recompute the grand prix points for every player for every event.)
At this point, I’m waiting to see how the new website Content Management System (CMS) will support incorporating externally generated content before deciding what will work best for things like this. (They’ve got several static pages to work with, such as the Grand Prix standings and the list of FIDE-rated events, and also some dynamic pages, like the club directory.)
Top 100 lists come to mind here, too, it takes Chuck and Darrell a good two days every other month to get these put together, but there’s a lot of fact checking that needs to be done for each list, checking sex and age for reasonableness, checking for non-USA status, etc. If we could automate a good portion of that process, we might be able to issue Top 100 lists every month rather than every other month.
John, the big difference between what FIDE is/was doing and what I’m suggesting is that YOU would be in charge of updating your ‘public contact’ information, via a form on the website.
In fact, that form has been there (on the old Members Only page, secure.uschess.org/MembersOnly) for quite a while and the public contact field is now included. That form needs to get incorporated into the member profile section of the member-content area, which is what Hal and Marty are doing, at which time we hope to be able to add other ‘affinity group’ fields, such as the fields to self-report military status that the Military Chess Committee has asked for more than once, and I’ve talked to them about that.