Digital FootO Event Adviser Seminar

After the success of last year’s edition, the IOF Foot Orienteering Commission decided to organise the online seminar for the education of Event Advisers and Senior Event Advisers on 29th November and 1st December. The seminar had around 100 participants – a 50% increase from 2021 – and was conducted without any technical problems through Microsoft Teams. This second EA seminar focused on 4 topics: mapping, sprint courses from 2022, rules interpretation and IT.

IOF Map Commission member Christer Carlsson started the programme with a very interesting presentation about the current challenges in orienteering mapping. It included advice for the Event Advisers and organisers in map checking, generalisation, printing quality and approved print shops.

IOF FootO Commission member – soon to be chairman – Helge Lang Pedersen shared his presentation about the experience from high level event sprint courses from 2022, which included a lot of examples from different legs from WOC in Denmark, the World Cup in Sweden and JWOC in Portugal.

David Rosen, chairman of the IOF Rules Commission had two presentations, first of which touched the controversial topic of how to interpret the IOF rules, especially whether competitors should be disqualified when entering an out-of-bounds area. His second presentation was about the rules changes for the coming 2023 season.

The last block of the programme again consisted of two presentations. Henrik Skoglund, who is responsible for managing the IOF Eventor, IOF’s event management system, talked about what and how organisers and event advisers should know about the Eventor system and how organisers should utilise its functions. The other session of this block was presented by Henning Spjelkavik, the chairman of the IOF IT Commission, who gave a presentation about what is the basic IT knowledge that WRE event advisers should know during the preparation process of an event.

All presentations and the link to the videos from the seminar can be found on the IOF website, in the FootO Event Adviser Clinics and Seminars section:

FootO Clinics and Seminars

The online seminar was very productive and should be offered every year for the FootO event advisers, concluded Áron Less, chairman of the IOF Foot Orienteering Commission. Next up in the education calendar for FootO is the High Level Event Seminar in Milan, on 18th-19th February 2023. Invitation to the High Level Seminar can be found at the same link – registration deadline is on 15th December.