What is recorded with each certificate
When a certificate is created there is an “issuing school”, and also an “event”, and of course a rank. So each time you will hold a ratings tournament you should create an event on the CGA site. Each child would have a list of the certificates they acquired over the years showing who gave it to them, and at which event (which gives the date), Please note that although you have the power to delete previous certificates you should not do this, unless the previous certificate was some sort of data entry error.
Who can issue certificates
Any club(school) created on the CGA site can be marked by CGA administrators as a “certificate issuing club(school)”. At that point you may assign certificates to any CGA member. Anyone who is an “admin” of the school on the CGA site can add these certificates. Also CGA site admin can assign certificates to any CGA member, as being issued by any school.
Getting the students of your school registered with the CGA and your school
The ideal process is as follows:
- The student (or more typically their parent) creates a free account on canadiango.org in the name of the student.
- They log in, select “Clubs”, select your school, and click the register button they see.
It is very likely that you will have a few students you are unable to get the parents to follow through with registering on the CGA site. In that case, you can create an account in the students name. You can then follow step (2) above yourself. If you have a contact email for the parent/student you can edit the account after you’ve registered it, changing the contact email to the parent. You can email them the CGA login info you created for their child. If you don’t have a contact email then just leave yourself as the account owner.
How to view and edit certificates
- Log in to the CGA site
- Go the “members” tab
- Search for the members of interest
- Click on the name of a particular member. On the individual member screen you can click on a “certificates” tab to see the certificate list for that member.
This is a bit klutzy for cases like viewing all the current certificates for members in your club. I expect we will enhance this in the future(again when developers have time) to view all certificates for a given club, or all certificates in a member search.
Downloading tournament files to use with your rating tournament
When you create an event on the CGA site there is a tick box whether you want to use standard CGA ratings or certificates as the rank(both those displayed in the event screen, and in the downloaded tournament file). Open Gotha isn’t perfect for certificate issuing tournaments as it doesn’t offer exactly the handicaps systems we use, but it still can be useful to assign the pairings even if you edit the assigned handicap’s afterward.
How should the certificate issuing tournament itself be run/how to choose what certificates to issue
GTA area schools have experimented with several systems over the last few years. I think we can say a 5 round tournament is agreed upon. The rest of it is a work in progress. I’m hoping to circulate something on this shortly, but I’m still struggling with some of the difficult choices. Expect another announcement email on this when I have something; anyway it is independent from the web site work.