Occassional thoughts about orienteering
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| okansas.blogspot.com Occassional thoughts about orienteering |
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Tuesday, November 11, 2003 What a messThe O' meet at Wyandotte this weekend was a bit of a mess. That's too bad because the turnout was decent, the map is mostly good and the weather was perfect.Here is a control-by-control run down of my course: 1. In the right place. 2. Hung about 1.5-2 lines too high. 3. Hung about 1 line too high. 4. Hung on a spur, about 2 lines too high and 30-40 meters away from the center of the circle. 5. In the right place. 6. Hung about 20 meters too far southwest. This control was also on the green course. The circle on the green master map was correct. 7. I never found the marker (I think it may have been about 40 meters too far to the south. 8. In the right reentrant, but about 2 lines too low (about 35 meters off). 9. I never found the marker. 10. I never found the marker. 11. Hung about 25 meters too far to the northwest. 12. In the right place. 13. In the right place. 14. I'm not sure. The control was hung in a flat part of the map with thick woods and no features. It seemed to be about 35 meters too far to the west. 15. In the right place, I guess. 16. Hung about 15 meters off, but it was on top of a spur and the circle showed the control being on the side of the spur. 17. Hung about 10 meters to the north. The circle was on a trail/stream junction. The control was hung where an unmapped trail met the stream. 18. In the right place, I guess. 19. In the right place (though the circle on the master map was off by about 20 meters). 20. In the right place. By my count, 8 of the 20 controls were hung in the right place. In baseball, that'd be a 400 batting average! I think the problems with control placement came about because several of the controls were put on features that were NOT shown on the map and the master maps were not drawn carefully enough. After the race, Gene and I compared the master maps for some of the controls that were on two courses. They master maps didn't match. Mary* walked the white course and one of the white course controls was misplaced (or I guess you could say the master map was mismarked). One of the white course controls was shown at the top of a hill on the master map but was hung in a reentrant (the clue was reentrant) about 80 meters (and 4 lines) away. Fallout Possum Trot, the local club that organized the event, has a yahoo group that's been buzzing with discussion of the meet. I haven't added my two cents worth, but I've read the discussion. Without getting into details, there is discussion of a lack of volunteers, needed to vet course, debate about whether or not controls were misplaced, suggestions to reduce the number of events in the future, etc... I'm interested in organizations and how they work. I'm also interested in orienteering. So I'm interested in the discussion. I think organizations differ in how they identify and address problems. Identifying problems is tricky. Some organizations, and some organizers, have mechanisms for identifying problems. A few examples: The City of Kansas City has both an internal auditor and an independent audit function. Both audit functions look for problems (the internal auditor reports to the city manager, the city auditor to the elected governing body) and recommend solutions. One of the local event organizers seems to make it a practice of chatting for a few minutes with orienteers after they've finished asking "How was it? Where the controls all in the right place? What'd you think of the course?" The Norwegian orienteering national team just had a planning meeting where part of the emphasis was on evaluating 2003 (presumably using some sort of process to identify what worked and what didn't). NASA has formal and informal policies, procedures and practices for ensuring safety. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board published a detailed analysis of the accident full of discussion of NASA's approach. *By the way, Mary is doing well. She walked the white course on Sunday and worked half a day yesterday. She's back at work full time today. I got a few email notes during the last week wishing her a speedy recovery and I passed them on to her. She appreciated the notes. posted by Michael | 9:05 AM 
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