Dear EGF Members,                            Reading, 22nd July 2006

Another year in the life of the EGF has gone by. We are approaching
the landmark of the 50th European Go Congress and I look forward
to celebrating 50 years of the EGF in 2009. We do not have any new
members joining us this year, but the Greek Go Association is not
far away from becoming an observer, and Go is continuing to prosper
in many of our member countries.

Unfortunately I must bring you bad news about Toyota. They have changed 
the way sponsorship is handled in Europe from departmental support to
a central fund with aims of promoting projects that promote road safety
and environmental issues. Of course Go does not fit these aims and they
are having to stop their support. Their name will be associated with
the European Go Tour until the end of the year, however. We will either
have to find a new sponsor to join with IGS-PandaNet in continuing to
support the tour, or carefully consider the future of both the Tour and
the European Cup which does not seem to be working very well. 

A major improvement in EGF services this year is the provision of the
new web site, eurogofed.org. The new site, I hope you agree, is easy
to use and easy to keep up to date. I think it was well worth the many
hours of effort I put in to producing it. We of course thank Zoran
Mutabzija and his company for supporting the old site and for 
continuing to support our email addresses. 

Internationally things are developing with the IGF being a founding  
member of IMSA. The new IGF web site, intgofed.org, was set up 
to support this initiative and help promote the plans to hold an
Intellympiad sometime in the future. I also hear there are plans to 
run a demo Go event alongside the Beijing Olympics in 2008. A lot 
of the work in setting up IMSA was done by Erik Puyt in the IGF European
Office; the EGF will continue to support the European Office's work. 
Also an exciting development is the move of Yuki Shigeno back to Japan
in her new job as IGF Secretary. We will miss seeing so much of her 
in Europe, but of course wish her continued success in her career. 

Thanks to various of you members, there was again some great Go events
held in Europe in the last year. I was lucky enough to sample Berlin
in winter and in spring (at the Kisei and the EPGC), but I cannot get
to all the events. Thank you anyway for all the kind invitations to the 
various events. 

I continue to work full time on Go promotion and teaching. Often EGF
work has taken up more of my time than desired. For example not being
able to transfer prize and expenses money to the hosts of two events 
caused a large amount of work in tracking down recipients. As a 
consequence we may be forced to restrict events to countries where 
making payments is not a problem. I thank EGF Treasurer Hans Kostka
for his patience in handling the payments. Anyway I look forward to 
working with you on successful Go projects in the coming year.

Very best Go Wishes,
AJAx
Tony Atkins
EGF President