Month: October 2018

Is Live Orienteering Dead?

I did not plan to write another post this week, but my attention was called to a new development that may be of interest of the delegates to the General Assembly meeting in Prague this weekend.

Live Orienteering.com redirects to Cleeng, a commercial video streaming provider for live streaming and to the event website for results, all with a somewhat cryptic message: “due to the problems with payments and access to the IOF LIVE Orienteering platform”.

The core functionalities of liveorienteering.com do not work: the pay per view and the one-stop result services, that is, the objectives why it was built and then completely rebuilt after 2 years with high expenses and lots of management time involved.

After all the above, it is just a little added colour that the “free of charge” event costs €6 per day if you want to see it.

LiveOrienteering - FootO WorldCup Round 4

Problems with Live Orienteering are nothing new. Last year it struggled with the WOC and the first round of the World Cup. This year I did not follow its performance, but I heard various comments about its non-reliable performance.

All this makes you wonder: is this the beginning of the end for Live Orienteering? Will the IOF Leadership abandon its venture into the money-sink of IT platform development?

In any case, here are some cornerstones for the Obituary of Live Orienteering based on Council minutes:

  • January 2014 (Point 23, Council minutes #168) – Leho presented the idea of the IOF LiveCentre to the Council as the platform for pay per view services. The cost of development was not mentioned, but rumour says that it was in the tens of thousands of euros with hundreds of hours of management time added.
  • October 2015 (Point 27, Council minutes #176) – the proposal to create a new digital platform (that is to replace the recently developed LiveCentre) with a hint about “cost-of- ownership issues, i.e. support and content management costs”.  In plain English that means that the original development was not thought through beyond the initial enthusiasm.
  • June 2016 (Point 28, Council minutes #179) “A beta test version could be expected for JWOC and WOC internal testing. […] The contract with the vendor of the current LiveCenter had been extended until November 30th, 2016 to guarantee a functioning LiveCenter for WOC.” – sounds like unexpected delays in development.
  • July 2017 (Point 7 and 20, Council minutes #185) “LIVE Orienteering had been released and it was noted that quality still needed to be improved. […] Council briefly discussed LIVE Orienteering status and noted that investments needed to continue and primarily to improve the reliability of the platform.” (that is, the platform still did not work, see also some screenshots here)
  • January 2018 (Point 10.3, Council minutes #187) “Investments were to be made in the development of Eventor, LIVE Orienteering and an update to the IOF webpage.” (that is, even more money was required)
  • June 2018 (Point 7, Council minutes #189) “3 issues were found during the use of LIVE Orienteering at EOC. 2 of the issues were solved early in the week, but one issue in the livestream.com platform remained unsolved. Focus now is on securing the performance for WOC.”  (sounds like more money needed)
  • October 2018 – Live Orienteering does not work at all as a platform for pay per view live streaming.

 

Looks like the perfect showcase for the IOF’s workings and an explanation for the financial performance of the IOF. It looks like lots of money and lots of management time (also an expense)  wasted with very little to show for.

Will there be questions from Member Federations on the General Assembly about how much money and human resources were spent on Live Orienteering, and the reasons that it looks like an abandoned venture?

75 years chasing Olympic Glory

The biennial General Assembly of the IOF takes place this weekend in Prague. Whoever attended these events before, or at least heard eyewitness reports, knows that it is very unlikely that anything unexpected would happen. There could be a handful of Member Federations who may try to throw a pebble into the quiet pond, but those attempts typically get attenuated by the quiet passivity of the majority, or by the deflecting tactics of the IOF Leadership. It is very, very unlikely that serious debate would take place on the General Assembly around questions of financials or anti-doping activity, no matter how much delegates may gossip about those questions over a beer or two.

I still hope though, that a Member Federation, or the IOF Leadership themselves may raise their voice to correct a very unfortunate oversight in the Strategic Directions and Focus Areas for the Congress Period 2018-2020 regarding the Olympic Ambition as quoted below (original in is in the Congress Binder):

AMBITION: TO BE INCLUDED IN THE OLYMPIC AND PARALYMPIC GAMES
Goal 2020:
✓ Inclusion as an optional sport for the Olympic Games in Paris 2024,
✓ Inclusion as an optional sport to Youth Olympic Games 2022 (FootO) and 2024 (SkiO)
✓ Be elected or appointed to a position in one of our stakeholder organisations

So far this is part of the usual General Assembly process that got established over the past two decades or so. The Council includes “Olympic Ambition” in the strategic plan. The General Assembly approves everything proposed by the Council with no modification. And from then on, the IOF leadership pushes the Olympic Dream, because “we have no choice; that is the mandate given by the GA; we cannot modify it; etc, etc.”

Funnily, this moral stance of  fully respecting General Assembly decisions is not observed when the President and the Council regularly modify the approved budget, even within 2 months of its approval. But that is another story.

The point of this post is to call attention to the following oversight in the 2018-2020 plan:

2019 marks the 75th year anniversary of the endeavour to include orienteering in the Olympic Games. The first negotiations with the IOC on orienteering began back in 1944, even though the IOF was not established until 1961.

This somewhat surprising, but nevertheless heartwarming information comes from the article of Heinz Tschudin, the late President of the IOF. In 1992 he published an article in Orienteering World titled Orienteering and the Olympics. I could not get a copy of the original, but here you can read a reprint published in Orienteering Canada in 1992.

Orienteering and the Olympics (1of2) - OrienteeringCanada_Newsletter_1992_Vol20_No2_FallOrienteering and the Olympics (2of2) - OrienteeringCanada_Newsletter_1992_Vol20_No2_Fall

It would be really interesting to see more information on this fact unearthed by Heinz Tschudin. It does sound strange at first sight, as we know that in 1944 majority of Europe was somewhat distracted from discussing future Olympic programmes. Yet, if we consider that in 1944 Sigfrid Edström, a Swede was the acting president of the IOC, and that SOFT, the Swedish Orienteering Federation, was already founded 1938, the story starts to look plausible. It would be fascinating to see more details on this either from the notes left by Heinz, or from the the SOFT or IOC archives.

This 26 year old article of Heinz provides superb insights into the process of trying to get  orienteering into the Olympics. I will discuss those under separate cover. Yet, I would like to call your attention to the point Heinz made about the core question he faced when tried to negotiate with the organisers of the 1982 Winter Olympic Games in Calgary:

How much money will you bring in?

36(!) years passed, but the IOF Leadership has not even tried to answer this core question that is required just to start the discussion about getting on the Olympic programme. Without a solid financial basis all the talk about Olympic Ambitions feels rather empty.

But now let’s focus on the many unique opportunities offered by this 75th anniversary, as listed below. It would be a major mistake not to use this occasion for the promotion of orienteering and the IOF’s Olympic Ambition.

Continue reading “75 years chasing Olympic Glory”