Mike’s eNews – 2 October 2015

Contents

Club & Association Conference

Vision & Strategy

Events – Something old, something new

Major events – looking forward

LIDAR data for mapping

Safeguarding & O-Safe

Talent & Performance Selection process

Board and directors

POC Portal

Please feel free to forward this eNews to your members; it’s going to be published on the eNews page at http://www.britishorienteering.org.uk/page/enews on Monday; if you would rather send them a link please feel free to do so.

Club & Association Conference

This year’s Association & Club Conference will be held in a week’s time on Saturday 10th October 2015 at NFU Mutual Head Office, Tiddington Road, Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire, CV37 7BJ.

The doors will open at 10:00am for registration and morning coffee, the conference will start at 11:00am. The food is good and the cakes great, you really don’t want to miss them!

The theme for this year’s Association & Club Conference is ‘the future of the sport’.

Your help is needed to support the Board of British Orienteering to develop a strategic plan that will help prioritise the development of orienteering over the period to 2025. The Conference will be a great opportunity to network with members from other clubs and associations and to make your views known about the development of the sport.

The Agenda has now been published and can be summarised as:

1. Vision for orienteering – background & scene setting
2. ‘Competitive orienteering’ – the focus of our vision and strategy
3. Q&A – opportunity to raise any matters and question you or your club/association may have for Board members
4. Simplifying the organising of orienteering events – making it easier to stage events and develop event volunteers

All members are invited to attend and we would encourage as many of you as possible to come along and have your say! If you are interested please contact the national office at info@britishorienteering.org.uk.

I’d love to see you there as I know that many of you are the significant leaders within your own clubs and associations.

A Vision for Orienteering

At the recent Board meeting directors received the feedback from the vision consultation including all of the ‘raw’ data/inputs. The bulk of the responses were in consideration of the ‘About Orienteering’ section and primarily related to running vs walking and competition vs recreation. In the main the responses showed there was general acceptance of the vision with 89% of responses selecting ‘ok’ or better. It should be said that the response rate was poor and based on just less than 60 people. The feedback on the underpinning statements was stronger with 95% responding ‘ok’ or better.

After discussion the Board agreed that the vision and underpinning statements should continue to be used to progress the strategic plan and whilst there remains room for improvement we have a statement that is at least a ‘good working’ version of the vision.

So our working version is:

Orienteering is the ‘go to’ competitive sport for people wanting to test themselves both physically and mentally.

Underpinning the vision are:

1.Raising the profile and public image of the sport

2.Strengthening the competitive infrastructure at the heart of the sport to ensure it meets the needs of competitors

3.Sustained success at the World Orienteering Championships

4.Simplifying and growing competitive orienteering

5.Increasing participation in orienteering

6.Developing and supporting the people who organise orienteering and work with participants

7.Working with and supporting partners who wish to offer or use orienteering

We hope the Association & Club Conference will help us put some ‘meat on the bones’ of key aspects of the Strategic Plan, particularly points 2, 4 and 6 above.

If you are interested, the Board minutes, when published on Tuesday hopefully next week, will provide a little more about the key points of the discussion at the Board.

I’m looking forward to gaining considerable more insight and ideas at the Conference next week.

Events – Something old, something new

A message from Chris James, Chair of Events & Competitions Committee.

Hello All,

I know we orienteers are a passionate and analytical lot so I have been doing some soul-searching and analysis on our behalf.  Without wishing to be melodramatic, we are at substantial and increasing risk of becoming an endangered species, and at a time when other testing and vigorous sports are growing.  Let me explain.

Our membership and our competing population have an increasing age profile at the same time as Triathlon, Trail Running and Cyclocross (to name just a few examples) are growing.  We are likely soon to be short of and depending on volunteers who, through no fault of their own, have insufficient experience and training to deliver safe and consistently enjoyable events at Level A.  Our ‘best terrain’ is under pressure, which creates increasing strain on some of our associations, and we are having difficulties agreeing, and sticking to, standard procedures.

On top of all of this, there is the real risk of a substantial reduction in our Sport England funding from early 2017, which will surely lead to less programmes and support being delivered by staff.

I will soon produce a paper of proposals which will offer some suggestions to help us to work together to clarify a way ahead and which will marry the best of what we have now with the best grassroots ideas for our future. The aim is to create a sustainable and growing sport. We can draw many valuable lessons from other sports which have already undergone (sometimes difficult) transformations and which have become more successful as a consequence.

I ask only that you get your ‘thinking hats’ on in advance and consider what can be done, however small, in order to help us to create a vibrant and growing orienteering community to ensure the future of the sport we love. The alternative is unthinkable and I know that together we can achieve great things.

Yours in Orienteering, Chris James

Chris has produced a more detailed document for you to consider and this will be published in the next edition of Focus.

Major Events – looking forward

The Board considered the future organising of our partnership events (JK, BOCs) at the recent meeting. Sally Pygott, Major Events Manager (MEM), had produced a report and recommendations which were considered by Board members. In brief:

• The 2015 partnership events have been staged largely successfully from the members’ perspective
• The involvement/impact of the MEM in the partnership events staged in 2015 has been mixed
• Not all 2016 events have yet signed up to a partnership agreement

After much discussion and consideration the Board agreed the following:

(Please note that all that follows regarding Board decisions is draft and liable to change)

1. All major events must be organised using the appropriate competition rules although it is recognised that these may need simplifying.
2. After 2016 the BOCs should be delivered by clubs (on behalf of associations) based on a ‘super levy’ model. A small group was established to provide the Board with some recommendations and modelling of the super levy as soon as possible.
3. The JK; it was agreed that a similar approach may be difficult to apply to the JK which is a far larger event (4 days, greater number of participants and greater financial risk) than the BOCs. After JK 2016 it was agreed that the association coordinating the JK will be able to negotiate with the MEM regarding a number of issues:

• The MEM’s time and role – note the cost of MEM time to be included in the event budget
• The risk/reward basis of any agreement – this will replace the current partnership agreement
• The potential use of an event organiser or event company to help stage aspects of the event

The Board agreed they are happy to see a variety of different solutions used to deliver future JKs but that the income generated from partnership events continues to be required to enable British Orienteering to function.

The Board also agreed that in the time the MEM is released from supporting our partnership events she should work to initiate a new, innovative series of individual events which are orienteering based and attractive to the 18 through 45 age group.

LIDAR data for mapping

Many thanks to Roger Hargreaves who alerted me to the change in process.

A new ordering system for accessing Open LIDAR data now exists. The following brief summaries the situation.

From 1 September 2015 we will be transitioning all of our LIDAR data from the Geomatics web portal to the Environment Agency's Datashare service, following our commitment to make LIDAR Open Data.

From today our National 2m, 1m and 50cm Composite LIDAR datasets will be available at http://environment.data.gov.uk/ds/survey, with additional LIDAR products being released in the days and weeks following.

Open Data can be accessed, used and shared by anyone. It allows access to our data under an Open Government Licence, which makes it free of charge and free of restriction, even for commercial use.

To access LIDAR data as Open Data, please go to http://environment.data.gov.uk/ds/survey.

From mid-September, you will no longer be able to download LIDAR data via the Geomatics web portal.

For further information and updates, please follow us on Twitter or Facebook, or visit the Geomatics website.

Susan Winter, Marketing Manager, Environment Agency Geomatics

For mappers the two copyright statements you require are:

OS copyright statement: ‘© Crown Copyright 2015 OS 100015287’
This contains the year the map is to be printed and our licence number. OS do require this statement to be printed in the correct font (Source Sans Pro) at a minimum of 6pt size.

If the map also involves Lidar data it will need both the Lidar and OS copyright statement, the Lidar text is: ‘© Environment Agency copyright 2015. All rights reserved.’

Safeguarding & O-Safe

Many of you will be aware that O-Safe our reference document for safeguarding and welfare has been updated over the summer. The consultation on the updated version of O-Safe has now closed and some useful feedback has been received, particularly concerning people taking photos and how images are used. In other respects the overall response was positive. O-Safe will be finalised and after being ratified by the Board will be published later in October. There will also be a short summary document that is an ‘easy read’ containing the most significant guidance.

Talent & Performance Selection process

Those interested will see that the details of the selection processes for 2016 have been published and can be found here.

There are 4 new documents:

• Selection Overview 2016
• Senior Selection 2016
• Junior Selection 2016
• Selectors’ Role 2016

As far as senior selection is concerned there will be some discussion by those interested around the omission of test races. This has been forced on us by circumstances and there is a rationale provided for the decision included within the Senior Selection 2016 paper.

The Junior Selection 2016 document is less contentious although there are changes to the process used in 2015 including the option to select age class 16 and younger athletes for EYOC.

It’s worth saying there has been a lot of discussion about the selection processes and we all agree it should be an honour to be selected to orienteering for GBR. It is not a right that an athlete or parents should expect. Programme staff are setting, or trying to set, high standards as you would expect and whilst they want to give athletes opportunities for development they want to see commitment – the age when athletes go to competitions wearing GBR kit because they want a holiday or social with their friends has past. Some people including athletes may regret this but if you want success on the world stage athletes have to make some hard decisions. Certainly programme staff do not see using members’ funds and government funding to support the holidaying fraternity!

Board and directors

The Board has been mentioned several times during this eNews. We are approaching that time of year when we are thinking about the 2016 AGM and part of this process is to encourage members (and non-members) to stand for election and appointment to the Board.

There will be positions for 2 directors to be elected at the AGM and we are currently seeking a further 1 independent director to be appointed to the Board as a consequence of a recent withdrawal.

The Board needs:

• Directors who will help us make sure the constituency of the Board reflects the population of competitors and volunteers; for instance we know the membership and participation base is around 45% women and 55% men whilst the Board is currently only 33% women.
• Directors that will improve the geographic spread so that it is more closely aligned to our membership and participation base
• Marketing, promotion and PR expertise
• Commercial expertise

If you know members or non-members that might be approached to see if they will stand for election or appointment please let me know.

Certainly the Board would like to have genuine competition for places at the Board table and it is a great opportunity for anybody to gain experience of operating at Board level or of gaining new skills, experiences and knowledge that will strengthen a CV – besides which it can be extremely interesting, sometimes entertaining!

POC Portal

Some time ago I flagged up to you the possibility that we would look to introduce a Permanent Orienteering Course (POC) Portal to our website. There were 8 responses with indications of interest and the project has been slowly ticking away behind the scenes. We now have a working brief for the POC portal and hoping to be in a position to test it shortly. If you are still interested please let me know.

'More People, More Places, More Podiums'

For further information about orienteering please visit www.britishorienteering.org.uk