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About Us
As of June 2012, The Glowing Stone Go Event Management and Outreach Program has 350 volunteers in 17 affiliated offices in 10 countries across the globe. We wouldn't be anywhere without the tireless help of these individuals and groups, and so, from the start, we wish to thank them from the bottom of our hearts!
The Glowing Stone was established in September 2008 as a “think-piece” for how to make Go more accessible to the community. Virtually nothing was done with The Glowing Stone for a year until October 2009 when Ambjörn Adomeit, the Director and Founder of The Glowing Stone got elected as Vice President of the Canadian Go Association (Marketing, Promotions and Intercollegiate Go League) at the Canadian Go Open in Toronto, during the General Annual Meeting 2009.
The Glowing Stone was unofficially launched in November 2009 when the Canadian Go Association allocated $700.00 CAD to help Ambjörn in his position to promote Go. The Glowing Stone’s URL magnets and the sign on top of the demo-board was funded by the Canadian Go Association, as well as instructional books (“Learn to Play Go!” available from Baduktopia, Yellow Mountain Imports, Amazon.ca and Slate & Shell) to help teach Go to youth more easily. We received a gift of a full-size demonstration board from Go Profession Janice Kim, 3-dan Professional for Christmas 2009, and it is a standard fixture at Glowing Stone events!
June 2010 heralded the day when The Glowing Stone Go Event Management and Outreach Program was officially launched as an Ontario-registered business. Working toward incorporation and the establishment of a formallized subsidiary non-profit outreach program, The Glowing Stone operates and is in constant contact with interested parties and cooperative efforts in Taiwan, Singapore, Spain, Portugal, Russia, the USA, across Canada, Holland and Romania. With friends and comrades in the Japanese, Korean and Chinese professional ranks, The Glowing Stone endeavours to make itself as supportive and as broadly-based as possible.
Our goal is to make Go more accessible to everyone: not only to help create places to play, but also to help bring the various clubs in Canada (and specifically in south-western Ontario in the immediate future) closer together. Accessibility is not limited to “let’s go to the coffee shop every week and play,” or by putting an ad in the newspaper, but also by providing affordable Go equipment to those who cannot otherwise afford the overly-inflated prices from other North American vendors. We place orders from whole-sellers in China and Japan to ensure that clubs and individuals can get equipment as inexpensively as possible.
Accessibility is even more important for those interested in the game, but who have difficulty using traditional equipment. We are working on developing handi-accessible go equipment. These will include:
- Larger stones with Braille labels (black/white) and easy-identifying marks with indents or raised bumps in the centre.
- Larger boards with magnetic and raised grids to help the visually impaired and those with fine-motor control issues (such as players with Parkinson’s Disease or arthritis!) place the stones with accuracy and the confidence that the stones won’t move.
- Frames that will clamp onto wheelchairs, and docking mechanisms to make wheel-chair Go easier and more comfortable.
We have other projects up our sleeves, but a good Go player knows that a good tesuji (clever play) is never revealed ahead of time!
We know that, as people, we’re less important than what we’re doing with our programming, but if you want to know about us, click below!
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