What we’ve been up to
Hey folks,
It’s been two months since the Elected Committee for UK Magic Officials were elected. I’d like to share some updates as to what we’ve been up to during that time, as we’ve had a number of different workstreams ongoing. I’d also love to take this opportunity to issue some thank-you’s. Firstly, I cannot overstate how grateful I am to the UK Exploratory Committee for the hard work and efforts put into laying the groundwork for UK Magic Officials to happen — a great deal of effort was put in in a very short span of time, sorting out voting mechanisms, reaching out to as much of the UK community as possible and exploring the legal frameworks by which we might exist. Secondly I’d like to thank the UK community in general - participation in this process and the trust that you have placed in us to figure out a way forwards from the closure of Judge Academy and into the current era of Magic: the Gathering has been essential to getting anything done. Much love <3
As for the different workstreams, and what has been happening in them, please read below.
Cofion cynnes (warm regards)
Winter
Legals
UK Magic Officials needs to exist in a legal sense — as voted for, we are establishing a company limited by guarantee and this requires writing up of some articles of association and other legal documentation. As we are a membership organisation with an elected commitee but also hired directors making up the executive, there were some intricacies that needed figuring out around decision-making power. Currently we’re pretty much ready-to-go with our legal documentation pending a review by the executive committee tonight.
Website
Building the website hasn’t taken an awfully long time; we’re based on SquareSpace and we’re using the commercial package which has better editing features than the basic package. Whilst the website construction hasn’t taken a ton of time in-and-of itself, thinking about the purpose of what we wanted the website to do and how that integrated with things like Judge Apps has taken up more of our time. Currently the website is here for you to see! We hope to host some more content on here in the future, and for the most part the website will, for now, act as a bit of an information board or sign-post for people to use to navigate being a member of UK Magic Officials. I am expecting a lot of website changes as we move forward over the next few weeks.
We’ve also spent some time gathering pictures and if you have pictures of Magic Officials working at events and you’d like to see them used on the website, or if you’d like to write a blog for the website, please do get in touch with me at winter@magicofficials.uk
Branding
We are working with an artist to produce a logo suitable for the organisation at the moment whislt trying to not tread on the toes of intellectual property and the likes. We have some draft logos that we’re exploring and these are being fleshed out further, as we’d like a logo which we can scale-up and -down as appropriate (think hoodies and name badges and the different needs those might have) for the website or for merchandise.
Certifications
Currently we are looking at the baseline judging certification. Reminiscent of the previous Level 1 certifications, we are looking at where the bar-for-entry should lie in terms of someone’s event judging skillset with a focus on FNM and prerelease style events. The biggest challenge to this has been obtaining the contact details of as many UK stores/TOs as possible. We’ve identified nearly 300 WPN locations and have used publicly available information to get in touch with a large number of these, and have sent out emails asking for them to fill out our “TO Questionnaire” which looks into the things TOs want out of their judges.
We’ve also started looking into a baseline Competitive REL Judging certification to address the minimum criteria for judging smaller Competitive REL events, and will be looking to create certifications appropriate for events staffing multiple tournament officials in the future — these will likely include certifications for Scorekeeping and Administrative roles.
If you are a TO or work with/for a TO and you/they have not received an e-mail and you/they would like to receive one, please give me a bell either at contact@magicofficials.uk or winter@magicofficials.uk
Social Media
With so much of our community already using the EU-North Discord Server, we’ve decided to not create #YetAnotherDiscordServer. We might change our approach in future, but for now we intend to continue on EU-North. We’ve begun to create accounts on Facebook and Twitter/X, though without an organisation logo we haven’t pushed these out yet. Keep posted for more information soon!
Directorship
We recently solicited for volunteers for our three directorship positions (President, Secretary and Treasurer) and appointed our new directors! I’d love to give a very warm welcome to Jason Howlett, Alistair Crook and David Lyford-Tilley into these roles. If you want to contact any of our directors, please email president@magicofficials.uk, secretary@magicofficials.uk or treasurer@magicofficials.uk as appropriate.
Outreach
This organisation requires us to work with others — which is a fantastic thing, as it means we get to share information. We have been discussing arrangements with having our organisation facilitated on Judge Apps (which has now been implemented), as well as reaching out to organisations like Judge Foundry and the International Judge Program with the aim of creating collaborative relationships where we share things like testing resources and knowledge about the communities we serve. We’re also hoping to build a relationship with WPN in some capacity, though the details of how this might look are unclear at the moment.
