1. C&C Committee
Frances asked how the committee is selected and Fred answered quite accurately - ACBL committees are appointed by the ACBL President(s) subject to approval by the ACBL Board. As far as I know, members of all ACBL committees serve multi-year terms and the terms are staggered, so each new ACBL President appoints only one third (usually) of the committee. I don't know whether all committees are the same as the one I happen to know about (Hall of Fame), but on that committee, members serve 3 year terms and can serve only 2 consecutive terms. I suspect the other committees are the same. The requirement for Board approval of the President's appointments is pretty new (came in within the last 5 years I'm sure), and arose after one President ignored recommendations by several committees and arguably used the committee appointments for the President's private purposes. There are not a large number of people asking to serve on the various ACBL committees, particularly C&C which has the biggest job and meets for two mornings at every NABC (other committees only meet for one morning), in addition to working between meetings. Mostly the existing members or sometimes Board members try to recruit people to serve.
C&C has a very wide-ranging area of responsibility - the Convention Charts are only a small part of Competitions & Conventions. I know that for several years much of their time was taken up with working out the format for the major KO events. Hmmm - maybe I could start a thread on whether it makes sense to take a whole day to cut a field of 68 to 64 (or whatever the number is where there's a ridiculously small cut the first day). Silly as that seems when it happens, the current format is almost certainly the best resolution of the conflicting desires not to have 3-way matches and not to have the first day cut too severe.
2. Convention Charts
Please note the name - ACBL Convention Charts and General Convention chart. The Mid-Chart and Super-Chart don't have "Convention" in their names (maybe because it sounds funny) but they also regulate only conventions, not natural bids. That's why you don't find anything in any of the charts specifically allowing a 1♠ opening bid or overcall that shows 4+ spades - that is not a convention and isn't regulated by the convention charts. Until a year ago, it couldn't have been so regulated and at the moment ACBL has not chosen to take advantage of the new authority granted in the Laws to regulate natural bids.
Although I agree that the GCC is not a wonder of clarity, perhaps you can agree that this doesn't seem to be causing much difficulty. People pretty much know what can be played in GCC events. Sure, strong, artificial & forcing 1♣ bids should have their own separate "allowed" sentence, instead of being lumped in with "all-purpose" 1m opening bids, but no one is claiming that Precision isn't allowed under the GCC. Sure, I agree (strongly as a matter of fact) with Richard's argument that what overcalls are allowed over a 1♣ opening should not be dependent on whether the bid shows 3+ clubs, but rather on whether the bid is really "artificial." But although some of the people who like to play CRASH and even more exotic things over a strong club also think they should use their gadget over 1♣ either clubs or balanced, most sensibly don't, and even the ones who do probably wouldn't use the gadgets in a club game against someone who opens 1♣ with 2 clubs only when 4432, so there's no serious harm being done. Yes, it would be better to clarify "all-purpose," but outside of a few BBO forum posters, I think everyone really does know what this means (and it isn't 1♣ shows 4+ hearts).
The Mid-Chart, on the other hand, was causing problems. When it was first drafted, the drafters decided that they should list the sort of bids that would be allowed and then provide that specific bids would be allowed only after their proponents had provided a description of the bid and a recommended defense that had been approved by the Convention & Defense Approval Subcommittee. Unfortunately, the requirement for approval of the description and defense wasn't very clearly stated, nor was there a good procedure for communicating with people who wanted to use different methods when those methods were in fact Mid-Chart legal because a defense had been approved. So a few years ago, the C&C Committee decided that the Mid-Chart needed to be re-written to make it clearer. That has now been done. While the Committee (or a Subcommittee, probably) was re-writing the Mid-Chart, they also considered whether some bids should be allowed in (essentially) KOs and others in pair games (and Board a Match), where rounds are shorter. They carefully reviewed the bids that had already been approved and provided that some of them would be allowed in events with 2 board rounds and some would only be allowed in events with 6 board rounds or 12 board rounds. (By the way, someone asked why Multi is in the 6 board round category - I think that was discussed at some length immediately after the Reisinger, but I believe the primary reason was because of the time pressure involved in 2 board rounds. Also of course, Multi is really tough to defend against - the only reason it's allowed at all is because it's been around so long). Instead of having a list of the kinds of bids that would be allowed if there was an approved description and defense, the Mid-Chart now lists those bids for which there is an approved description and defense. It will have to be updated regularly (maybe the bad formatting in item number 5, which contains the description of items 6-20, will also be fixed sometime). No, I see I'm wrong; additional approved bids will be listed in the defense database before being added to the Mid-Chart list. I suppose that makes sense as a practical matter (the Convention Charts are printed on paper as well as posted on the ACBL website), but hopefully there will be frequent updates of the Mid-Chart so people won't have to look two places to know what is allowed.
Whether the C&C Committee will decide that the flaws in the GCC merit re-writing it I don't know. That may depend on the other things on their plate. I suspect that most of the complainers here would rather see more prompt action on requests for convention approval than a re-write of the GCC and those things are clearly related - there are only so many hours in every day.
One other thing about C&C has to do with comments (fair ones) that emails to C&C don't get answered very promptly, or apparently in one case mentioned earlier, as politely as they should. I believe that ACBL is in the process of some reorganization and it may not be clear at the moment who is responsible for dealing with C&C emails. Rick Beye isn't any more. I'd be surprised if Butch Campbell was Rick's permanent replacement in this position (I have absolutely no inside information here - I'm just guessing based on the other things that Butch does). I do have "inside information" that no requests for convention approval have been forwarded to the Subcommittee responsible for that in several months.
C&C, like all ACBL committees, should have Minutes and those Minutes should be posted on the ACBL website. My guess is that the reason they are not is that no one has managed to prepare Minutes for several meetings. Perhaps it's because they haven't gotten posted. Hopefully that state of affairs will change. However, I also note that the Hall of Fame Committee members aren't even listed on the website , so there's actually more information about C&C than HoF. Or at least a little more - the 2009 C&C Committee isn't listed yet.
You'll notice that Minutes are posted for the Laws Commission. Much as I'd like to give my husband the credit for that, it really belongs to Gary Blaiss, who's the ACBL staff support for that committee and does an outstanding job preparing Minutes.
2. The Australians and Jan & Chip
Someone asked why I had complained to the Director. Well, I'm a big believer that summoning the Director shouldn't be viewed as a "complaint." Also, I believe that it was actually Chip who first called the Director. He did so because he knew that transfer 1 bids were not supposed to be legal in Mid-Chart events. I didn't participate very much in any of the discussion, but as far as I recall, the opponents said they'd been told they could play the transfer 1 bids and pointed to the line in the Mid-Chart that said bids showing 4+ cards in a known suit were allowed; Chip explained that there also had to be an approved description & defense and suggested to the Director that he consult the ACBL management person who at that time was in charge of Conventions (I honestly don't remember who it was). The Director did so and was told that the method was not legal. He therefore told the players that it was not legal. How a defense was posted on the website I do not know & neither does Chip. I do not recall that the opponents had a defense from the website, but I certainly have no recollection that they didn't either. If Josh says they did, I'm sure he's right. I'm also confident that the Director's ruling was correct and was made after careful investigation. Richard may be right that the fact that a defense had been posted on the ACBL website gave the players grounds for a lawsuit (I don't think so but maybe), but it did not give them the right to play the bids.
I called the Director (and I am willing to have this call classified as a "complaint") when I heard the pair tell their next round opponents that 1♦ showed 4+ hearts and 1♥ showed 4+ spades. I remember that part of the whole thing much more than anything else because I was shocked and unhappy that anyone would deliberately disobey the Director's clear ruling.
By the way, many of the posts complaining about the C&C committee say things like that they are acting in their own best interest and not in the interest of bridge. I suspect that Chip & I were, even back then, far better able to deal with a transfer opening bid than the other pairs in our section. So it would actually have been in our best interest to let the opponents play their transfer bids, we wouldn't be bothered and every time someone else in our section had a problem with them we'd get a matchpoint. It would certainly have been in our best interest, after we had prevented the opponents from playing transfers at our table, to ignore the fact that they were continuing to play them at the next table. But we're bad guys and out to promote our own best interest, not that of bridge, so of course we did all of this for nefarious reasons.
Finally, JoshS (amazing that this forum has more Josh's posting than Jan's ) commented:
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I'm sure you really know why - because Precision 1♦ and short 1♣ have been played by "mainstream" players for years, long before any of these Convention Charts were even thought of, and the drafters of the Convention Charts weren't trying to rock the boat or ban things that were commonly played. Exactly the same reason why Multi 2♦ is not classified as a Brown Sticker bid by the WBF. I could quote you "much harder to defend and much more pernicious" about that too, but by the time the Systems Regulations were being written, it was so common that the regulators really couldn't bar it.