Honorable Sankira Qin,

There is great wisdom in your decision to postpone this event until after the holidays. I was pleased to participate as a "Team Captain" in the World Haiku Club's live haiku event 2 summers past. Our team was named the Tapping Woodpeckers, after a famous haiku by Master Matsuo Basho:

kitsutsuki no
hashira wo tataku
sumai kana

You can see more about our team at the website:

http://www.haikuworld.org/tappingwoodpeckers/

The other teams, Pointing Radishes, Shichifukijin, and Seven Samurai and our team, met on three days to "compete" with our haiku, and a renku composition. On tournament days, the judges announced topics, and each team members submitted a haiku on that topic for the judges to consider. Most days there were more than 400 messages posted!

As you plan this event, we learned that the biggest considerations were:

1) timezones of members

2) potential mail delays which may mean judges do not receive emails in a live fashion. The latter may be fixed if you are holding this event entirely "on the web". Ours was done via email in a yahoogroups room.

If I can be of any service to you, I am an officer of the Haiku Society of America (my term starts in 2 days actually) and have hosted the Shiki Monthly Kukai for the past 25 months.

_-_
gar zhou