MAPS AND DECISIONS, III:
Redistricting.
Sandra L. Arlinghaus and William C.
Arlinghaus
General
Introduction
Tournament level duplicate bridge is a card
game that is a sport. As is the case with sports, generally,
there is an overseeing body: in basketball it is the National
Basketball Association (NBA); in bridge it is the American Contract
Bridge League for North America (ACBL) and the World Bridge Federation
(WBF) for all nations in the world. The ACBL is a non-profit
organization based in Memphis, Tennessee. The ACBL has about
150,000 members in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico. The WBF has
more than 10 million members. The ACBL owns two buildings in
Memphis where they house a large staff to maintain records, databases,
publications, and a host of other operations associated with this
business in the entertainment/sports sector of the business
world. The second author of this work is currently a member of
the Board of Directors of the ACBL. This Board, as do equivalent
boards of other corporations, sets policy for the organization, makes
decisions that affect the entire population of ACBL members, and
oversees the work of the Chief Executive Officer. There are 25
Board members, each representing one geographical "district" of the
ACBL. Thus, the members of the Board of Directors are also
referred to, even though their charge is to represent the interests of
the entire ACBL, "District Directors."
Redistricting
The second author was also a member
of the "Redistricting Committee," an ACBL Board committee, during the
year 2005. A quick glance at the numbers in Figure
1, however,
suggests that perhaps the system might work better if the size, shape,
or number of districts were altered. ACBL staff
and management has been interested, for a number of years, in having a
more streamlined
organization. One way to consider such a process is to reduce the
number of
districts and shrink the size of the Board of Directors.
Naturally, Directors from different regions have various viewpoints on
this matter. During 2005, a "redistricting" committee was
convened to consider the possibility of redistricting the ACBL.
Maps offered some useful information for decisions; because the maps
were created in a GIS with database and map interaction, it was
relatively straightforward to create various scenarios for the
Redistricting Committee to consider.
Solstice: An Electronic Journal
of Geography and
Mathematics,
Institute of Mathematical Geography, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Volume XVII, Number 1.
http://www.InstituteOfMathematicalGeography.org/