Shark Freediving

Today is the last day to send in your application for AIDA Executive board member. Several people have already  signed up. Stavros Kastrinakis, Panos Lianos, Fitzclark (Is this the doctor?), Pim Vermeulen (as sports or technical officer). Last thing I heard was that Sebastian Naslund was also thinking of applying for a board position.

If you want to read more about AIDA International and what is happening click here.

Bill Stromberg send an email explaining some of the things that have happened in the past to the AIDA Assembly mailinglist on October 12. He has now made this letter public, so I will publish it below for your information.

Dear Assembly,

As the President for AIDA I had the best intentions all the way, and never wanted to appear like some sort dictator. But since the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008 I started to get more and more frustrated about the sleeping positions inside of the executive board and also in the technical commission. During the autumn 2008 everything backfired and I started to take decision above the heads of people. This was very stupid done and done in a stressful situation where my options appeared to be small and to me very limited. At this time I also started to feel a little alienated to some of the key people, who did NOT sleep. This probably because we worked too much and friction began to arise and I did not take care of the problem when it was small and manageable. Anyhow so was my behaviour far from perfect and when the problem from the technical commission was brought in to the board the problems inside of the board started to accelerate and this was partly because the board had a problem to decide how to solve the problem from the TC. This was some kind of a bad circle and a “Catch-22″ situation. To remember is that the AIDA work during the last 3 years have been taken around 2-3 hours every day in average and during some periods a lot more (!). All this when you have a personal company and a work to take care of. Of course there could be a lot of more delegation of work, but with non-active members, some of us took on too much more work than we should, at least I am very sure I did. Maybe it was possible to handle AIDA with only 5 active people 1999 but 10 years later it is impossible, we need a full board that are active and this also in each commission. Now I can see much more activity already on our mailing lists and hopefully also in our forum soon (please!). And I am sure the next executive board will be full of energy to make all the necessary moves to make everything to work, as it should.

When I was re-elected as the President in December 2008 my intention was to stay and work very active until Okinawa WC 2010 and directly after that help to find a new President to take over after me. And then maybe stay one year inside of the board as the TC officer, a post that sometime is closer to my nature than the President is. My goals during this last period as President was to make sure the WC in Okinawa took place and become the best WC ever. Also to create a Medical and Science Commission that would be the world leading in its field with the best possible doctors and researchers. Then help to re-create a very strong TC commission and to have them start with a new safety protocol that will be totally up-dated with the latest when it comes to how safety should be done and how to deal with it. Then of course also have them to up-date the rules as usual, and keep fine-tuning the English etc. A mission for the new TC should be to also come up with a solution for the lanyard problem and maybe have AIDA to start making high quality lanyards and start to sell them for a very good price. This can be done for low money in some parts of the world and should be one of the near future things to do.

Another big thing would be to also start to send money back to the education commission and let them have more options when it comes to the evolution of our education program. After all, the education commission have been the real big money-maker and to channel money back to them would be the most natural thing to do.

When it came to the ranking database and a competition result system we had big plans already, but because of various technical complications and that some of our key persons, for the system we used, have been otherwise engaged, we have a tiring delay for AIDA. This is hopefully on its way to be solved though we got an offer from the Freedive Central people. I have asked them to make a dummy-site so we can check and see if we need to add things or change some setups etc. The final decision about this should be taken by the new board that get selected shortly.

Then I would end to say that I still have the fire and glow to keep these intentions.

Best regards
Bill Strömberg