Mike’s eNews – 5 May 2017

Contents

Incentive Scheme

Xplorer

Web development

Event Officials

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

Fairly short this month but hopefully still of interest to a few of you.

Incentive Scheme

We have recently been contacted by several clubs and members regarding the national incentive scheme. The scheme features the Navigation and Racing Challenges that track individual members progress through the colour coded courses and corresponding technical difficulties. In order for individual members results to be tracked their results need to be uploaded. Results from any event can count towards these awards and with the focus on juniors and newcomers the importance of uploading Local (level D) results is increased.

The scheme works by allocating results based on course names. To ensure members are recognised for their achievements, courses need to be named using the colour of the course. Unfortunately, the system requires specific naming to work; any shorthand versions or abbreviations are not recognised. For clarity, the course names recognised are listed below:

Technical Difficulty (TD)	Colour Coded Courses
1	White
2	Yellow
3	Orange, Long Orange
4	Light Green
5	Very Short Green, Short Green, Green, Short Blue, Blue, Short Brown, Brown, Black

Certificates are awarded electronically after successfully completing 3 colour coded courses at the same technical difficulty. Members are notified directly, via the website and an email, when they have been awarded a certificate. We have noted that there may be an issue with the automatic email system and are working with the developers to ensure this is rectified unfortunately it is partly out of our control and is dependent mail servers interacting. Club secretaries have access to the Incentive Report through their member login on the website; other club officials can request access to this should it be deemed appropriate by the club. Many club coaches or development leads have access to enable them to award juniors with printed versions of the certificates.

Xplorer

If you are interested in what green spaces in your area are being used to run Xplorer activities, a list is available to members on the website.

British Orienteering has been recognised by partners for the growth of Xplorer over the past 4 years and that culminated in over 80,000 participant runs in 2016 – a fantastic accomplishment and one we are proud of. We believe Xplorer works well because of the physical and online resources that we have created with the help of local delivery partners, as well as the ability of Xplorer to be tailored to a variety of target markets and demographics.

Whilst British Orienteering has been able to secure funding from Sport England for the next 4 years the reduction of 53% on the previous 4 year funding means Xplorer will no longer be funded.  To enable us to continue to provide these resources to community partners and develop new resources, British Orienteering needs to cover costs previously paid for by Sport England funding. Unfortunately, this means putting a cost on the setup and resource provision for Xplorer. Moving forward, delivery partners will have to fund the delivery of Xplorer.  Initial responses to this from delivery partners are positive and we hope to be able to sustain if not grow Xplorer. We will be looking to keep clubs in the loop with ongoing developments.

If clubs wish to see more information on this please see http://www.xplorer.org.uk/changes

Web Development

You will already have noticed that the website has changed considerable. The launch took place on Tuesday and whilst successful has produced an array of bugs. These are being addressed as quickly as they are reported to us, after being checked and prioritised. With a rollout as large as this it was always inevitable that there would be a multitude of bugs and the size of the web system makes testing challenging.

The general response to the new look site has been positive although there remains a lot of work to tweak the site and update content.

For your information:

1.       There’s just over one million lines of code of which a large percentage had to be updated to make use of the stronger security available in the current release of the database on which the website is built.

2.       The security and permissions system being used has been completely re-written.

3.       The navigation system is completely updated

4.       There are some new modules including: the single theme forum, an events report enabling list of event officials to be produced, a ‘volunteer’ module enabling clubs to gather/enter information about both event officials and ‘day volunteers’, user ‘dashboard’, etc.

At this time, not all of the above are generally accessible to members and these will remain ‘hidden’ until the site settles down.

There are several further sections to be uploaded to the site once the core site has settled down including:

1.       Updated ranking algorithm

2.       Enhanced user views of the ranking list

3.       Views of the volunteer information contained within the database

4.       Xplorer user views

As new sections are rolled out we’ll let you know and we’ll be providing instructions for clubs regarding the volunteer module.

Hopefully the new ‘member dashboard’ will become a central and well used part of the system.

Event Officials

The section of the website providing support and resources for event officials has been restructured and hopefully will enable officials to find documents more easily – and in a single place. There has been quite a lot of confusion over recent years with multiple copies of documents being storied in the website. The rationalisation that has taken place should move us into a position of only maintaining one copy of a document – but we’ll see.

Of course, the changes will undoubtedly frustrate some volunteers as change always does but hopefully volunteers that use the website will soon see the benefits of the new structure.

The key sections are now under ‘Get involved’:

Mapping has a section to itself; organising and planning an event are joined and contain 4 menu items:

·         News: a place where we can provide significant news stories or articles that are specifically for organisers and planners; guidance about touch free E-card usage is currently an item

·         Staging Events: an overview of the organising and planning responsibilities and training available

·         Rules: containing the Rules of Orienteering (incl. appendices) and the Competition Rules

·         Resource library: containing the multitude of documents used by organisers and planners to stage an event; these are broken into categories to help users find the document they want.

I hope that this helps users locate the articles they want more easily and prevents the embarrassment of different versions of articles being on the website.

 

Best wishes,

Mike

 

 

Kindest regards

 

Scott Parker

Administrator

British Orienteering

01629 583037

www.britishorienteering.org.uk

https://twitter.com/gbrorienteering

https://www.facebook.com/britishorienteering