Community O+

[Gross]

No doubt you will be publishing your own blueprint for success on here in due course Gross?

Done my bit:) NEDS & SEDS are examples

[Mrs H]

re the BOF employees who aren't orienteers comment I see BOF are planning to have 1/3 of their directors "independant" which means non-orienteers. Also in Focus. I'm not clear why this is suddenly a requirement but it seems a strange direction to be going down. This isn't the GMC we are talking about, just an organisation that helps run our sport and hobby.
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It doesn't actually say that the "independent" (note spelling) directors have to be non-orienteers, just that they have not been involved in national governance before. That might be a good thing - some fresh blood etc

[Red Adder]

The independent directors requirement is being imposed on BOF by Govt agencies as part of their criteria to be eligible for grants. Every new government says it wants to reduce red tape but soon manages to increase it.

[besty]

The article in Summer 2012 Focus puts the RunChallenge and Xplorer initiatives into context.
One of the significant elements of that context seem to me that

“The internal source pool of club orienteers who have delivered Community O is at the limits of its capacity. Research has shown that there is a market of Local Authorities, commercial and other organisations who want to become involved in the targeted approach to orienteering. These potential partners have already demonstrated that they are prepared to supply a workforce given that British orienteering is willing to provide a product and train the workforce.” (p7)

This is re-emphasised in the Autumn edition of Focus which states that “

We have recognised the problems we have caused by asking club volunteers to deliver Community O during 2009/2013 and we recognise that clubs need to focus on meeting the needs of their members by staging competitive orienteering events and club training activities.”(p7)

So British Orienteering i.e. those staff paid for by Sport England will be delivering Run Challenge and Xplorer, leaving the clubs to do what they have always done i.e. organise events.

British orienteering will find the beginners and newcomers .

However British Orienteering needs to work together with the clubs so that clubs can try to convert the RunChallengers and Xplorers to mainstream orienteering. The article in the Autumn edition states that RunChallenge and Xplorer participants will be signposted into local club events and activities but the clubs need to have local events and coaching opportunities etc for them to go to.

The strategy seems fine.

What is worrying is the statement in the Summer edition which says

“British Orienteering and the Board of British Orienteering is aware that there is a need to operate effectively in the market place and this requires the NGB to consider the needs of potential participants in addition tto the needs of current members. There is unfortunately a degree of conflict between these needs and the Board is seeking to operate more effectively as a body taking market place decisions in a more business-like manner.” (p8)

If British Orienteering is a business rather than a sporting organisation at what stage do the views and needs of current members not matter at all?

[Mrs H]

Might we be getting to the stage then where we need to have an orienteering users' group to run in parallel with the governing body? OFBOF

(I'm actually not joking )

[mike g]

I also noticed the repeated use of the word "professional" in the write up in Focus. That participants will expect "professional organisers" and events to be "professional and well run" is mentioned. The expectations are going to be high, and if they are met what happens if/when they go to a "normal" orienteering event?

If the 'professional organisers' are non-orienteers, it's likely the participants will find that 'normal' orienteering events are much better run. The worst organised orienteering-type event I've ever been to was a score event which a charity paid a professional running events company to organise for them in London a few years ago.

[daffdy]

It seems to me that BOF are jumping from one allegdly "pefect-solution-one-size-fits-all" to another. For the last 18 months / 2 years it has been Community O - same place every week - believe us it's the only way to grow the sport. Many had doubts, myself included, but were prepared to give it a go and time to work.
One month BOF are ramming lots of new venues down our throats, then the next they are unilaterally terminating them, with no notice / discussion.

Definitely not a one-size-fits-all solution in that Xplorer and RunChallenge are age-targeted. And with my university club development officer hat on, having a training night each week in a recogniseable, accessible, familiar location has been invaluable in keeping members interested and in recruiting and training newcomers...and yes, they still want to come to races on Sundays too. Would struggle to manage without it, to be honest.

re the BOF employees who aren't orienteers comment I see BOF are planning to have 1/3 of their directors "independant" which means non-orienteers. Also in Focus. I'm not clear why this is suddenly a requirement but it seems a strange direction to be going down. This isn't the GMC we are talking about, just an organisation that helps run our sport and hobby.
.

It doesn't actually say that the "independent" (note spelling) directors have to be non-orienteers, just that they have not been involved in national governance before. That might be a good thing - some fresh blood etc

Yep, politics, and it's actually good practice apparently. Luckily the definition agreed means that orienteers who haven't been involved in British Orientering committees etc can count as independent.

If the 'professional organisers' are non-orienteers, it's likely the participants will find that 'normal' orienteering events are much better run. The worst organised orienteering-type event I've ever been to was a score event which a charity paid a professional running events company to organise for them in London a few years ago.

Better run, possibly. Better publicised? Probably not. It's sad, but I find it's pretty rare to find beginners orienteering events advertised well, and the quality of organisation doesn't really matter if only a few people know it's happening... but club beginners events and the proposed initiatives are different things.

[roadrunner]

re the BOF employees who aren't orienteers comment I see BOF are planning to have 1/3 of their directors "independant" which means non-orienteers. Also in Focus.

Focus doesn't say they must be non-orienteers, just that they haven't been involved before in the national governance structure. I guess a great many orienteers would qualify

[PKJ]

Seems to me this is the sort of thing our governing body should be doing - being forward-looking, trying to get Sport England money into the sport, finding ways of doing things which clubs can't.

Reading this as an insider - started orienteering in 1979, will run any type of event but still prefers classic courses on terrain - I'm not interested, it's sort of orienteering but not as I know it. But, I'm trying not be 'stuck up', so thinking of non-orienteering friends, parents, work colleagues and the target market the strategy makes sense to me.
Xplorers and RunChallengers April-September, see who is interested in traditional orienteering in the autumn and winter. And leaves clubs to carry on holding events, sorting out land access charges, environmental constraints...all the other things we do.

I'm also puzzled by the idea that we shouldn't go after Sport England (or Scotland/Wales) money. There's all the talk of Olympic legacy and Sport England's Places People Play strategy. If BOF weren't pitching in I'd want to know why not.

[Paul Frost]

I'm also puzzled by the idea that we shouldn't go after Sport England (or Scotland/Wales) money. There's all the talk of Olympic legacy and Sport England's Places People Play strategy. If BOF weren't pitching in I'd want to know why not.

The problem with stuff like the Sport England money is that it comes with a lot of strings. Sometimes those strings pull the attention away from the core purpose of a governing body.
The other issue is that Sport England money can't be spent outside of England, so all the projects/ideas are only fundable for English clubs. The Northern Irish, Welsh and Scottish clubs can't implement them.
So the British Orienteering Federation is becoming the English Orienteering Association.

One problem is that there are many things that are GB wide, like the GB squad. Read the minutes of the last board meeting and you will see references about Sport England money and what it can't be used for, for example:

The 4 tiers of the programme/pathway are: Talent ID, Talent Development, Elite Development and World Class Performance. It appears likely that Sport England will fund the England parts of the first 3 part of the pathway and that British Orienteering will be required to fund where necessary the involvement of other Home Nations athletes in the programmes and all of the World Class Performance programme.
Page 6

What I would like to see is more attention spent on solving the cash shortage for developing/maintaining "normal" orienteering rather than chasing after money to develop "alternative" orienteering.
Coaching, which has an essential role in the development of new talent and improving the skills of existing orienteers is not getting much funding these days, there used to be a full time paid director of coaching, now it gets a few hours a week admin support.

I've no problem with going after money from third parties, government agencies or commercial sponsors, but it's what the money is being spent on, and the distraction of effort from the core purpose of a British (not English) governing body.

[frog]

I agree with Paul. I think BOF need their equivalent of the SOA to deal with English matters, just as England need their own parliament so Scottish Westminster MPs don't get bored listening to debates on English health policies. I'm also not sure when in Focus p5 on the discussion of independent (I got it right this time Mrs H!) directors it says they mustn't have been members of any national committee or group whether the SOA is a national committee as most people living in Scotland think of Scotland as a nation. I hate vague terms like "nation" and would prefer BOF and focus to talk about countries or the UK which is a collection of countries.
Also I suspect a limited number of Scotland based orienteers are willing to travel to England for BOF committee meetings and they are probably the same folk who have been willing to travel down for meetings in the past and are now excluded from being directors.
It seems a bit mad to me. I would rather BOF's directors were selected on ability, not just on not having done it before.
It all seems to be getting very blazerified.

[Scott]

It seems a bit mad to me. I would rather BOF's directors were selected on ability, not just on not having done it before.

The whole point of having independent directors is that they will have to apply, submit CVs, be interviewed, and be selected on the basis of what skills they have to offer and what skills the Board needs.

Now, I happen to think that the current batch of directors are a pretty decent bunch, but that is fundamentally in spite of the way in which they are currently appointed, not because of it.

Since the Board was introduced in 2008, three of the five elections to it have been uncontested, ie. in those years everybody who wanted to become a director has been able to, with no selection process beyond finding two other BOF members to propose and second them. (I have the dubious honour of having lost both the contested elections; make of that what you will.)

When we do have AGM votes, turnout is generally around 5%; even with the excitement of "How many levels should we have?" in 2010, it was still under 10%.

Regardless of whether or not you approve of the current composition, I can't believe that anybody would think that "whoever wants to do it can" or "elections that could theoretically be won by making sure all your clubmates fill out proxy-voting forms" are sensible ways to ensure we have an appropriately skilled and balanced Board in the long term.

Don't get me wrong, I fully support the Board being democratically accountable to the membership, and I think it is perfectly correct that the majority of directors should continue to be directly elected. But having some appointed directors will hopefully allow us to fill some of the big skills gaps that exist on the Board at present: given how often people identify publicity/marketing as a major issue, it would be great to have a director who actually knew something about that. And ensuring we have directors who aren't viewing everything through the prism of having served X years on a BOF committee first can't do any harm either.

[distracted]

What I would like to see is more attention spent on solving the cash shortage for developing/maintaining "normal" orienteering rather than chasing after money to develop "alternative" orienteering.

Who do you intend should solve this cash shortage? Where else, outside of orienteering, is money likely to come from, apart from governmental bodies?

Coaching, which has an essential role in the development of new talent and improving the skills of existing orienteers is not getting much funding these days, there used to be a full time paid director of coaching, now it gets a few hours a week admin support.

And where did the money for this director of coaching come from? I'm guessing an external funding source. In which case, if they don't want their money being spent this way...

I've no problem with going after money from third parties, government agencies or commercial sponsors, but it's what the money is being spent on, and the distraction of effort from the core purpose of a British (not English) governing body.

A point that many will no doubt agree with - and a fair number would argue that the sport would be better off without the funding from Sport England.

However, it's a catch-22. If you remove this funding, there's little to no money to employ anyone at an office to do the jobs a governing body needs to do to maintain the sport, as people feel is important. Let alone attempting to develop 'normal orienteering,' as it has been labelled.

Without paid staff, the load then goes back onto the volunteer workforce, which is already overstretched. It barely has the required resources to keep the current events programme running, let alone trying to concoct/run new initiatives to attract new people/groups into the sport as well.

And the vast majority of money that isn't from a Sport England source comes from the pockets of orienteers. So we're just recycling money within the sport. Consider the proportion of non-club members running at the majority of events, and it's blatantly clear that there's little to no money coming into the sport from non-orienteers.

Why is this the case? Because the majority of clubs don't have the knowledge or expertise to market their events to non-orienteers. And the majority of clubs wouldn't ever consider hosting an event/race that specifically targets the non-orienteer to the detriment of the 'normal orienteer,' even if, ultimately, it would actually benefit the club and the sport.

The obvious conclusion - if we want more to be done, we have to dig deeper into the pockets of the 'normal orienteer'. Yet any suggestion of the 'normal orienteer' spending more money is inevitably shot down in flames...

But how can people expect to get what you want from central office when they're not willing to pay more, not willing to get others to pay more, and not making the effort to to bring any 'unrestricted' funds from those external to the sport?

It may seem counter-intuitive, but if maintenance of the status quo for the 'normal orienteer' is what people are after, this might have to involve some breaking of the status quo to get there...