Future of British Orienteering Questionnaire

[Scott]

With impeccable timing, giving my rant about needing to publicly devote more time and effort to the Big Issues, a questionnaire about the future of orienteering has just appeared on the British Orienteering website. It's not very long, so please take the time to fill it out, and make sure all your clubmates/friends/family do so as well.

http://freeonlinesurveys.com/rendersurvey.asp?sid=epis47bppr2r0lh934936

[Spookster]

...and make sure all your clubmates/friends/family do so as well.

... especially those in the 20-40 year old age group, if you can get them sufficiently interested.

[Scott]

Don't worry, I'm creating a "Future of British Orienteering Questionnaire" Facebook event right now

[EddieH]

The survey's all well and good, but there are many of these items that I believe are very important - However I don't believe that central input is particularly important for those particular items.

[awk]

With impeccable timing, giving my rant about needing to publicly devote more time and effort to the Big Issues, a questionnaire about the future of orienteering has just appeared on the British Orienteering website.

Always difficult to put these things together, but I found the survey horribly frustrating - too many broad sweeping statements with no means of qualifying or commenting. I gave up half way through as I could see yet another question making assumptions about my answer.

[Clive Coles]

I think the first question is a key issue

The vision for British Orienteering is 'more people, more places, more podiums'; does this vision continue to meet our needs?

When I started orienteering I seem to remember the strap line " a sport for all ". I thought this summed up what orienteering offered me at the time.
a sport that was inclusive ~ open to all ages and abilities.

The current strap line just seems to focus on the quest for success but... , if we are honest, very few of our top orienteers make it to and sustain their place on the international stage.

Are we anymore successful than we were say 20 years ago ? ~ medals were achieved then without anything like the current level of support provide by BOF.

Visions are worthless unless they are reinforced by strategy and funding. BOF in recent times seems to have been confused on delivering strategy. They first promoted the concept of RDO's, then scrapped the position. Now Participation Managers are the flavour of the month. We are also now majoring on training and licensing coaches and event officials. I wonder ~ what next ? We seem to be grasshoppering.

The funding issue is going to determine what can be delivered in the future. With less money on offer I would like to see aspirations subjected to a realism test.

We can no longer afford to follow this current vision ~ unless we are prepared to pay more by way of membership and event entry fees.

I frankly don't believe the ordinary club membership identifies this vision.

We should therefore be prepared to cut back on what we expect BOF to provide.

Perhaps " a sport for all" wasn't so bad after all.

[AndyC]

"More People, More Places, More Podiums."

Having heard clubmates say "I was losing the will to live on that transit" and similar -perhaps there should be a 4th "More Pleasure"?

[frog]

My reply incuded thoughts that 1 sentence "visions" were generally pointless, only organisations with too much time on their hands and nutters have "visions", and that to retain and encourage volunteers we need less red tape ie scrap compulsary courses, first aid courses etc. Suspect they'll ignore both points.
If they want to do courses have more on IT training for sportident, OCAD etc, plus pay someone to answer IT requests, so I don't feel so guilty when I hassle SI man.

[IanD]

I gave up on the survey, because it's structured in a way that makes it impossible to communicate what I would wish to.

For example, how should I answer the question about the importance of "Providing more events that are attractive to orienteers willing to travel further" (my emphasis)?

If I say it' s very important, then I would be implying that we need more major events for orienteers willing to travel, which I don't think is the case - I think we have enough of them.

So the correct answer is that I think it's not important to have more events that are attractive to orienteers willing to travel further. But if I give that answer, I worry that the interpretation would be such events are not important, whereas actually I think they are the most important, the events which do most to keep me interested in the sport.

[afterthought]

I've had a go. BOF is the lead organisation so I gave my view on where I thought they should prioritise.

As to the question about more events for people willing to travel I agree with IanD so I said no, and wrote in a comment box that I thought making a few main weekends most attractive to as many people as possible in the 15-40 age bracket was important.

As to what will get my interest I said I'll ask one test question - will the plan help to get 100+ teams running in W and M open classes at the major events.

[andypat]

I did it.
Bit concerned about how some of the questions are interpreted along the lines of the concerns above.

eg

Developing event officials i.e. planner, organiser, mapper and controller

I made a comment that I think theres a level of mistrust of BOF now amongst some of us who volunteer that when I see a comment like this I see red tape and hoops to jump through. Maybe not whats meant, but difficult to answer the question when you dont know exactly what ethos is behind it. BOF needs to win back a bit of trust from the grassroots first.

Urban orienteering could be the next big thing for our sport, but BOF's visible input into this branch seems to have been a poorly worded comment that effectively barred under 16s from it. Not exactly visionary leadership.