The problems we had in the past were pairings. Many people were not playing in local events, just waiting for the national, so about 60% of the field had a rating of 1500. This included international masters from the USCF who were playing Gothic for the first time.

We solved this one year by playing an email double round robin at time controls of 1 move per 24 hours, but it took 7 months to conclude that portion of the tournament. At the end, we had a fair idea of people's ratings, and we held a closed tournament with a plus score in the round robin as the qualifying criteria to enter.

I was thinking of something similar for 2003. Maybe do a double round robin online at accelerated controls, facing one opponent each day. After playing everyone, we will have an idea about how to do Swiss pairings.

Otherwise, you might have the undesireable result where strong players are being paired against other strong players early in the event, knocking one of them out due to the nature of the Swiss system.

More feedback on this is welcome.