Training Log Archive: iansmith

Live notes from the March 25 OUSA board meeting:

National Ranking Event Proposal
- Higher costs for non-OUSA members is a barrier to national meet attendance at a number of clubs (e.g. COC, LAOC). Conversely, lower entry fees has been seen as one of the benefits to OUSA membership. Balancing this is a open question, along with the broader question about what are the benefits of being an OUSA member.

Finances
- Broadly speaking, the Board's choice to dramatically curtail expenditures in the 2017 budget seem to be on track. The Board received almost all of expected club charter funds as income in January, so OUSA isn't expected to default in the immediate future. We're paying severance to the ED right now, which I'm not particularly happy about.
- Our accounting is still barely functional, i.e. only able to answer basic finance questions with effort. We are working on this, especially generating meaningful reports that can inform policy decisions.

Rogaine report -- Gavin Wyatt-Mair
- BAOC is interested in holding the World Rogaining Champs in 2020; this is exciting. The World Rogaining Committee seems to prefer North America, so it's likely a bid would be approved. BAOC is thinking of using a venue near Tahoe, probably in August 2020.
- Gavin presented an excellent document to the Board with a plan for the 2020 rogaine. BAOC will bid for the North American Rogaining champs in 2018.
- Quality must be excellent; the event in the Dakotas had some problems.
- Estimate 75 volunteers will be needed.
- BAOC is planning on taking the financial risk, possibly with a grant from OUSA.
- Budget estimates break-even for 500 competitors, target attendance is 1000 competitors. History
- OUSA commitment is a grant, some expert counsel from past Rogaining projects. We should probably add some effort to publicize, share available equipment, etc.

Club Survey - Greg Lennon
- Responses were obtained from 59 of 60 clubs (though only 46 gave answers?)
- Most important things: more volunteers, more participants, making and updating maps
- Lesser priorities: fiscal stability, event quality, training, etc.

50th Anniversary presentations - Mapping
- Mapping proposal from Peter Goodwin is good, with two main thrusts - 1) information sharing via webinars, tutorials, and online resources, e.g. for basemap generation and 2) a handful of mapping clinics around the country led by competent mappers to teach willing mappers how to make a basic forest or park map.
- The proposal is missing key details - who will make the webinars, how the money requested ($2k and $8k for the two goals) will be allocated, who the mapping experts are, where the clinics will be or how they will be chosen, and how the program's efficacy will be evaluated.
- Most importantly, money is not the limiting factor for this program to go forward. These details can be researched and obtained without money. Also, the Board can have a phone call on short notice to allocate money, but I couldn't support a $10k allocation without understanding more detail.

50th anniversary presentations - Technology: Websites
- Boris, Cristina, and I presented a proposal for a two-phase website template development. Phase 1 is a $1k project to survey clubs, figure out what they want, and come up with a plan. Phase 2 is a bigger investment to build a viable template, with the goal of having 3 clubs adopt it by the end of 2017. Rebecca Jensen, who engineered the COC template, is the developer we plan to contract to work on this.
- Board approved $1k for Phase 1, with an added component of determining whether clubs would be interested in an Eventor-like solution. Eventor is ultimately a back-end system, so a front-end CRM solution would still be necessary.
- I hope to advance to Phase 2 - engineering the solution - by summer 2017. Boris and Ian are overseeing this.

Junior Development Discussion
- There are lots of good ideas and lessons about systems that have already been employed.
- Goal is to share these best practices with the club structure, and to consider both club-supported and independent junior entities (e.g. WIOL for the former and disjoint entities like Navigation Games for the latter).
- What can we as OUSA do to make these programs happen? You need a base of volunteer support and buy-in from clubs, but maybe OUSA can help with initial funding, best practices, etc. For instance, OUSA could give grants - say at three different tiers reflecting the advancement of a program - to help fund part-time staff or buy materials.
- Get people together and drive the effort to make these things happen. Which leads to:

OUSA Convention
- I have been considering this for a while; I want to bring back the OUSA convention at the Rochester meet and not simply have the AGM. There are numerous topics to talk about. I don't know that people will attend, but we need to engineer the forum. Mapping, how to publicize, how to have junior programs, club trainings and development, finances, etc.

C • Costs for non-OUSA members 8

Intermittently over the course of the evening, I did the following, partly as a result of a challenge by Cristina:

200 tuckups
200 oblique crunches
30 leg lifts (planned to do 50 but got tired)
4x1 min plank