Staying informed, rational ignorance and the importance of the individual.

No matter at what level of Ultimate you play, it is of benefit and value to all involved for you to stay informed. This applies not only to what is going on within your own team but also your local teams, national teams as well as everything else that goes on within the UKU community.

It isn't even about how involved you wish to be as an individual. There's a concept known as 'rational ignorance'. When the effort of informing or educating ones self on a particular issue outweighs the potential benefit that said knowledge would provide, the person who chooses to stay uneducated is said to be 'rationally ignorant'. The most valuable thing any of us have to offer is our time and so using it in this sitution would surely be irrational and indeed a waste of our time...

There is a problem however, as soon as a large group of people are called upon to make an important decision, the ability of that group to consistently come to the best outcome is severely impaired. Just look at the government, who voted Gordon Brown as Prime Minister?

With this in mind we should do all ourselves a favour and stay informed. Apply this to everything you do but as this is a UK Ultimate blog, I'll apply it to that. Ultimate here is still in its early days, we get to shape what it is going to be in the future! There has been a recent discussion on EuroDisc about where Ultimate is heading, if you are reading this blog you likely enjoy playing Ultimate at the least and probably care about it, after all we do give to it much of our most valued commodity (not money). So do yourself a favour, don't under estimate the individual, speak up and play Ultimate!

On to the useful bit of this post, below are a number of easy ways that you can stay directly informed with everything that is going on, so many times do captains and coaches at all levels try to disseminate information to their players only to be told later by a player that they didn't receive anything. Stop being ignorant. The internet is phenomenal in that it has the power to immediately erase ignorance if you allow it to.

Again, apply this to everything but this is a UK Ultiamte blog so,

First of all sign up to your own teams mailing list. As you have already read this far, you are probably the sort of person who doesn't actually need to be reading this but at least you can point others in its direction. A lot of teams use private forums, yahoo or google groups. Don't be the person who always needs to be passed on information individually, get signed up.

The UKU website has a comprehensive page of links where you can simply follow the ones that apply to you . You can find it here. Of all of them, make sure to sign upto BritDisc

EuroDisc. Don't be intimidated by the fact that your messages will be read Europe-wide. There are often discussions about the current development of Ultimate. Have a look at the archives and sign up here

If you are UK student Ultimate player, sign up at uniultimate to stay informed.

A good forum where you can ask any Ultimate related questions and get answers from around the world pretty quickly is Ultitalk.com. Check it out!

BananaCut is a great website that allows you to follow current Ultimate related goings on very easily.

Ffindr is another very good resource for finding out what is going on both local to you and around the world.

If you know of any other good resources, share!

I'm off to Monkey Foo in Grenoble now, ta ra!