MapRun Street-O Organiser

Street-O aims to attract newcomers to HH as well as providing regular local orienteering for existing orienteers.

NB: During lockdown we ran a DIY version of Street-O

Overview

Important note: the pre-event preparation and file creation should be completed at least a fortnight before the event - this gives time for the Street-O coordinator to check, adjust, print and get the maps to the preceding event.

• Planning: determine the parking location / meeting point and plan your course

• Review the Safety considerations and prepare a Risk Assessment

• Fine-tune and test the locations of your control sites

• Finalise everything for printing

• Send the files to the Street-O coordinator for printing and publishing to MapRun

• Check the event details are correctly shown on the website

• Entries and payment – no action needed!

• Acquire the equipment you will need

• Run the event

• After the event... 

Planning

Format

Plan a 45 min score event with 30 - 40 controls to give about 10-12km total route with good route choice - control clusters tend to be more suitable than linear routes. Also ensure that there are 5-10 controls which make a walker route, approx 3km.  Ideally, the course should cover around two-thirds of an A4 1:10,000 map; the remaining space can then be used for control descriptions and other overprints.

Scoring is 20 points/control, -10 points for each part minute late.

Parking, controls and viable route choices should all use publicly accessible land, otherwise formal access permissions will be required.

Parking

Parking should preferably be at an easily-located, free car park. Start and finish should be 20-50m from the meeting point. MapRun allows 15m GPS tolerance so it's best if the start point is that fence / gate / bollard / tree etc just over there.

Check the accuracy of the joining instructions for your event on the website fixtures list. Think about someone who has never been to this location before. Most participants will depend on the website instructions.

Map

A map annotated with controls can be obtained from OpenOrienteeringMap (run by David Dixon). Detailed help is provided and a back-up site is also available. Use 1:10,000 scale, the "Street-O" style and 5m LIDAR contours unless you've arranged otherwise with the Street-O coordinator.

Check for obvious mistakes and missing features, especially short-cut paths. OOmap uses OpenStreetMap mapping, which can be self-edited. If you are not (and do not wish to become) an editor of OpenStreetMap, the Street-O Co-ordinator can help or find someone who can.

If your map is a surveyed HH orienteering map, you can obtain it, and advice on planning software, from the Mapping Co-Ordinator.

Additional overprinting (out-of-bounds, crossings, questions, etc) is described under “Finalising” below but if in doubt, leave to the Street-O coordinator. See this example map.

Controls

Control features should be MapRun-friendly. This means they should be accessible point-features that can be accurately mapped (to within a metre or two), typically using aerial imagery. Good options are post boxes and lampposts; ideally these should not be obscured by tree cover.   

Each feature should be obvious once the runner is within 10 - 20 m. We are testing simple navigation on the run, not arithmetic, eyesight, or general knowledge.

Take care to place control markers accurately on the map but do make sure it's clear as to which side of a street they can found (leave a small gap between your dot and the street). Adjust the numbers so that they don't obscure a path. OOMap does not currently allow you to break a control circle, so if the circle obscures a path you may have to move the control.

Control Descriptions

Create your control descriptions table by adding descriptions to the controls in OOMap.  

OPTIONAL (the Street-O coordinator is happy to do this) - Once complete, get "Clues" in OOMap select the table, copy / paste into Excel (Word saves it as text not a table). You only need the 2 columns: No and Description. In either Word or Excel, select the table and give it a White fill. Make sure the first line of the control descriptions says where Start/Finish is.  Hint: If there is not much room on the map page to fit in the Control Descriptions, organise your controls so that those with the same features are numbered consecutively and then condense them together e.g. 1-20: post boxes. For this, you can easily reorganise & renumber them by dragging them into order within the Control Descriptions table.

Safety

Please pay special attention to traffic and road crossings when planning, and ensure any significant risks are avoided or mitigated. If your Street-O is confined to parks to allow unaccompanied juniors, all route choices must avoid all traffic. Car parks are acceptable for juniors only if visibility is good and traffic is forced to a crawl.

You must complete a risk assessment, taking account of the location and risks specific to your event. The Street-O Co-ordinator will provide a template, and guidance. In general, the course should only include roads of 30mph and below, and all roads should have pavement provision.  Any exceptions to this need to be explicitly documented and assessed. Here is an example RA. It must be countersigned in advance of the evening by the Street-O Co-ordinator, or an appropriately qualified individual (the Volunteer Co-ordinator has details of all such people in the Club). It helps the person reviewing the risk assessment if you include a map with the outer limit of the course, any out of bounds areas and any crossing points marked.

Check the accuracy of the safety instructions for your event on the website fixtures list.

Fine-tuning control positions

OOMap

Control positions can be adjusted directly in OOMap - press the small "S" button at the top-right of the map to toggle an aerial photo view.  If this is not sufficient to accurately place the control, try...

Google Earth

The control positions need to be as accurate as possible and this is best done using Google Earth:

• Download the KML file from OOmap and open it in Google Earth. Zoom into each control and accurately reposition on the chosen feature by right-clicking on the control and selecting Properties; this will let you drag it to the revised location.  You may need to use the embedded Street View option to help if unclear or if there is tree cover. Another useful technique is to look for shadows of lampposts etc.

• Where Google Earth can't be used, you will need to record the GPS position on a ground visit, but this is very much a second best because a single device on a single day is unlikely to give a sufficiently accurate location. Consider moving the control to somewhere / something you can see in Google Earth!

When all adjusted, you can resave the KML file from Google Earth. Consider whether you have moved any controls far enough that you need to update the OOMap file - remember that this is the map that will be printed whereas the KML file tells MapRun where to put the control in GPS coordinates. It's likely that if the control was near say a junction you're better off leaving it as on OOMap, because you will no doubt have put it on the right side. If you've had to move the control significantly along the street, consider moving the control on OOMap.

Testing the control positions

MapRun has a CheckSites facility to let you create a private test course that can be used to check that all your controls register successfully when a runner reaches them. NB this is a testing facility for you and the live MapRun event will still need to be created once everything is finalised:

• You will need the KMZ file downloaded from OOMap (this contains the map) and the updated control locations in the KML file saved from Google Earth.

• Upload the KMZ & KML files to MapRun CheckSites. Note that when you do this, the format of the name that you give your event is material - an example could be: HH Harpenden NW 2022 PXASV ScoreV300 PZ.  Here PXAS means it’s a score and its V suffix tells the phone app to always show your current position. ScoreV300 means “Victoria” style scoring  (20 pts per control, -10 per minute late) with 300 minutes allowed. Finally the PZ suffix means the event is unlocked by a 6 digit PIN code which will be displayed once the file uploads are complete. Note the PIN.

To find your event in MapRun on your phone, click the Menu button and select the green CheckSites icon (not the text box!). Enter the PIN code to download it.  You may then find it helpful to use the option in "Options & Settings" to make the test event to be "Start Anywhere". You may also need to uncheck the "require 4 digit PIN" option - for some reason this bears no relation to the 6-digit CheckSites PIN!

Send off your files

Email all the files and an emergency contact phone number to the Street-O coordinator who will get the event published on MapRun and have the maps printed on (recycled) waterproof paper:

• the PDF file from OOMap

• the KMZ file from OOMap

• the KML file from OOMap (edited in Google Earth if needed)

• and of course the risk assessment if you haven't already had that agreed!

The Street-O coordinator will let you know the MapRun PIN code that will be needed by the competitors.

HH Website

Most participants will depend on the club website to find us, so check that your event is listed in the Fixtures list and that the joining instructions are accurate and sufficiently detailed for someone who has never been to this location before.

Also ensure that any Safety Information is clearly noted, for example specific road crossing instructions or no unaccompanied U16s.

Advise the webmaster or Street-O coordinator if you require any updates to be made.

Entries & Payments

Street-O events prefer pre-entry in advance through HH Map Reservation.  We can take entry on the day if there are sufficient maps. 

Entry fees are £3 for HH/BOF members, £5 others and are made direct to the club via online payment through the reservation website (pre-2025: bank transfer). On the day entries can pay in cash if necessary.

For 2025, a season ticket option is available and the list of purchasers is kept separately.

Equipment

Co-ordinate with the previous week's organiser or Street-O Co-ordinator to collect the equipment and your maps.  The feather banner and a kite are supplied; if you think you will require other signage please discuss with the Street-O coordinator in advance. We no longer use SI kit.

On the Day

• Get the HH Map Reservation entry list from Kevin Parkes or the Street-O coordinator who can can download it on the afternoon of the event and send to you by email, along with the list of season ticket holders.  Save / print for use as the basis of the log of who is taking part.

• Arrive in good time (keen runners often turn up early!).

• Put up the feather flag at the meeting point and use other signage on approach (arrow board, kite) as deemed necessary.

• If you have time please promote joining the club. There are "Join Us" business cards in the kit.

• If anyone does turn up without entering in advance, a run is not guaranteed. If a map is available they could run, in which case, the event organiser should take note of their name/ number/ email before they start so that we have safety information and can follow up for payment afterwards.  

• Stay at the start/finish to help latecomers.  

• Make sure at least one competitor is present at the end until all others have returned - they will be needed as help in the event of a missing competitor. If someone is missing you should try ringing their emergency contact number first.

Afterwards

The equipment needs to be handed on to the next organiser – this usually happens at the end of your event.  Liaise in advance with the next organiser & the Street-O coordinator to arrange this.   Otherwise, there is nothing further for the Organiser to do!  

Other things happening after the event are:

• the Street-O coordinator or webmaster will publish "results" - basically a capture of the MapRun results page, which includes a version of RouteGadget.

• the Street-O coordinator may publish a DIY-O variant of the map to the website and link from the results and DIY-O page.  DIY-O variant has the safety info as page 1 and a parking icon with postcode.  This also has the organiser phone number removed.

• The MapRun coordinator takes requests to adjust results (eg phone didn't go beep). People can do this for themselves using the 'HITMO' option in MapRun - we normally allow it if people are shown passing within 30m on HITMO and they're certain they went to the right feature.