The MT is sad to announce that the DM Association will be administered from today by the MT. We have been trying for some time to bring DM into line with the scheme rules but have not been able to progress this and so this drastic step is the only way we can see of making DM meet its requirements.
The current situation is that DM is supposed to be a P100 compliant association but 144 of the summits are not even 100. Removing those summits leaves around 800 P100 summits in the association. It still fails the tests applied to all new associations since 2010 that gives an objective value for whether an association can be allowed to relax the P150 requirement to P100. Analysis shows that there are somewhere between 286 to 339 P150 summits in DM. The range in figures is due to the fact that the forested nature on many DM summits causes a degree of error in using SRTM DEM data in locating summits.
A cut off date has been applied to all DM summits of 1/Feb/2016. i.e. all DM summits cease to be valid on that date. This is the date when DM would have become fully P150 had things progressed as we expected and it would have given a 9 month window for any activators to activate summits that were going to be deleted. Unfortunately, with the association under MT administration it becomes a battle against the current workload for the MT now to produce the P150 summits list before this cut off date.
All sub-P100 summits will now be removed from the association on 31/May/2015. We hope to have a list of 286 summits which are definitely P150 ready for upload before 1/Feb/2016 but this does depend on the MT workload. We have a number of associations in preparation in the Americas and Asia who have been working with the MT for some time and preparing and uploading these associations will take precedence, the DM work will have to fit in when we have time.
The remaining 53 summits which are potentially P150 cannot be added without some further work involving checking against accurate relief mapping. The MT members have no time available to do this for the foreseeable future and so these summits will not be added until DM is released from direct MT administration.
To be clear, no points already credited to any activator or chaser will be lost.
We are sorry that things have progressed to this point. However, we believe strongly that the rules should be applied fairly and equally to every association involved in SOTA. The MT wishes to make it known now that if similar situations like this arise in future then we will have no option but to bring any association back into MT administration in order to make it compliant.
The MT will not enter into any further discussion of this issue.
obo SOTA MT