Discussion: Orienteering in the Caribbean

So, say I wanted to go to the Caribbean for a week and train for orienteering later this month. Google told me about this 2008 event on the park world tour. Are there maps available? Are there any O maps in the Caribbean?

Yeah, I've seen them. They don't look very good. It's mostly sprint maps of urban or semi-urban areas that were hastily made, mostly from google earth photos. I'll try to dig up some links.

Ok, here you go: http://www.ronnerdal.net/kart/index.php?user=ronne...
Look for maps from 2008.

Barbados is a new IOF country I believe. (Jim Webster may know more)
Boris is quite right - the 2008 event was really fun, but without the Royal Clipper taking you from race to race I'm not sure how good the experience would be ;-)

I love that each map has the favourite local beer listed together with logo. Change that to rum and I'm so there. With a windchill this morning of -27C I often wonder if there is a market for Portugal/Spain winter training camps/WRE equivalent in the southern states and/or Caribbean. A week of sprint racing at Disney in February, for example.

Barbados and Jamaica are both IOF members. You could try contacting them for info on maps.

Hammer, AZ in February would also have some training camp/WRE appeal. You're definitely not the only one who's thought about it...

But back to the Caribbean, it would be pretty awesome to have a bunch of high quality sprint maps of some of the old downtowns, and maybe a canoe-o or swim-o in The Baths in Virgin Gorda. Yum.

So much O to do and organize. Someone here needs to win the lottery big time and treat the rest of us.

The Caracas map is about 1km from where I used to live! I used to run in that park quite a bit. I'd heard rumors of the existence of the map, but this is the first time I've ever actually seen it.

So much O to do and organize. Someone here needs to win the lottery big time and treat the rest of us.

Or, "the rest" should learn to contribute what it really costs to put on events, and not externalize these costs.

We've gone to orienteering clubs a number of times with similar projects that by all indications have a reasonable market. We go, "here's how much it will cost to put on, and here's how much you'd make, and we think it's a good proposal for the club." Club: "Yes great but we don't have any more volunteer time." What happened? Costs of putting on events have been externalized into volunteer time demands, and it hamstrings the development.

You are suggesting there is a market for these events. If that is the case, then why isn't someone stepping in to take up the opportunity? If a club is full of busy professionals with full time jobs, then their assessment of any potential full-pay event will be based on their own time opportunity cost rather than on whether the event is profitable in isolation. Saying 'volunteers have no time' is not crowding out any entrepreneurs from taking up the opportunity. It is saying that busy professionals will not sacrifice their day job to run the event.

In the examples I mention, a map already exists, the club owns the map, and has a written or unwritten policy of "no outisde organizations may hold events on our map". So, the crowding-out is right there. Besides, it's not good marketing to put on an event with the locals not being on board; you've just lost a good chunk of your attendance.

No-one map leases? It happens in our club. We see it as a win-win... club gets paid for use of the map and gets the pleasure of running in a good event without organisational hassles.

In this economy, it doesn't surprise me that some individuals are unwilling to allocate their precious time so that some other organization or individual makes a profit on their labor. Perhaps they are allocating their labor so that they make a profit for themselves, or are allocating it to the truly needy in society, rather than to a self-described organization of affluents, who collectively, could easily afford to pay all labor costs (witness large sums being spent, for example, for de mimimus benefit). I think it is fine if people enjoy volunteering, but a big problem with the business model, that comes up again and and again, is that they shouldn't be expected to.

(Of course, in the former case, they will be called selfish or some other pejorative by one or the other of the organizations who are missing out on the free input cost or free marketing benefit or whatever). Words and guilt are the payment we use when we can't otherwise get someone we don't know to do something free for us. I think if you base a business model on the availability of free labor, you shouldn't complain if there are spot shortages in that availability.

A guy a know put on this event in Curacao a few years ago.

Maybe we should try to hire orienteering club members directly, instead of offering money to the club and asking the club to provide volunteers. This still doesn't remove the "we sit on the map and it's ours" issue.