COLOR MAPS NOW ON USATF SITE

Does this mean that you, as a Final Signatory, bypass Paul Hronjak, the Eastern Vice-Chair, and send your stuff straight to the registrar?

Color Copies Are a Bad Idea

Color copies for course maps have negative effects in several areas:

1) Those people needing multiple copies must use a color copier to generate them, unless great care is taken to use colors that copy well in black and white. Even there, photographs rarely reproduce well when copied in black and white.

2) The registrar’s job gets complicated when material starts coming in as daily email instead of weekly envelopes. Paper certificates can be stacked and dealt with as time permits, and keeping track of what has been dealt with is easy. Email map attachments must be dealt with on a real-time basis, as they come in. This adds work, especially if the material is not exactly as needed. The scanning method presently in use is repetitive and simple, but the color email attachments must be dealt with one at a time, and kept track of.

One person sending in the occasional color map may not be a big burden, but if everything starts coming in electronically it will be a hell of a job for the registrar to keep track of things.

Also - what about paper copies on file? Where is the backup?

3) This is a unilateral decision of Neville’s, and before we decide to abandon what has been present practice I believe that some discussion as to costs and benefits needs to take place. Thus far it seems that Neville has decided for himself, and somehow gotten Stu and Paul Hronjak to go along. What should our map policy be?

Aside from some esthetic improvements I do not see that the benefit justifes the use of color in course maps.

What may be sent to the race director, of course, is up to him and the measurer.

Neville, I think you jumped the gun, and that Chairman Gene Newman needs to get in and straighten this out.

Frankly Pete you are “jumping the gun” a little bit here. You are too quickly speaking for three people, Stu Reigel, Paul Hronjak, and Gene Newman, without first hearing their praises or possible concerns for Neville Wood’s electronic course map submittals. Some additional conversation should take place before suggesting a quorum of agreement against the idea.

The body of work that Neville Wood has painstaking undertaken and single handily accomplished are some of the biggest events RRTC has seen in years. Neville’s fresh thinking and progressive approach to our work is a breath of newness we ought to embrace.

I like the idea. The time has come for an option to submit electronic documents from our Application to Certify a Course to full color course maps.

Pete:
I only send the map files to Stu after Paul has had time to complete a review of the maps from two hard copies I send him.

The biggest advantage I find is not the color, but bypassing the copying and scanning so that my maps are no longer highly degraded. They should now reproduce quite well in grayscale if anyone cannot use color.

I told Stu that I did not wish to create extra work for him and I rather gather I do not. I try to send the files as batches, but perhaps I can stack them on a site for Stu to retrieve as time permits.

Pete, I agree with almost all of what you put up on this site with your many thoughtful submission, but I really must take exception to your second comment here. Your first point regarding the copying of maps is valid and I totally agree that we should not use any colour that could be confusing when photocopied in black and white. But I suggest it would be much more simple if everyone just submitted electronic copies for certification and filing. Really, who needs or wants a hard copy. Personally, I have not filed a piece of paper for serveral years - all my cert applications and maps are submitted electronically.

I have been speaking from the perspective of one who is a measurer and a certifier and has been the course registrar.

As registrar, I found the job easier to do when it was done as a matter of unchanging routine. I could deal with the stack of mailed-in paper on my own time, when I wanted, and filing the paper was done upon the completion of the computer work. It was easy to keep track of.

With things coming in by email, it is more difficult to put them aside until there is time to deal with them.

The key here is uniformity. It ought to be an all-or-nothing situation. Having to do a job two ways makes it tougher.

Now, as a certifier I sometimes get electronic submissions and mostly get paper ones, sent by measurers. I've never received an electronic submission which included a decent electronic map. When I measure a course I sometimes produce an electronic map as a pdf or jpg file to send to the race director to put on his web site. I don't worry about file size.

Are we headed toward a double standard, where computer-savvy certifiers can have nice color maps on the USATF site but ordinary measurers cannot? Not everybody is handy at the kind of manipulations required to produce course maps to the needed specifications.

If I was the only one generating certificates and maps from my office I could pretty well do as I please. All my maps could be electronic. However, to turn some of the maps I receive into electronic format could be tough. I think it's doable.

If asked, I could send all my maps electronically to the standard needed. How many certifiers can do this? I don't know. But I would prefer to do it in only one way, not two. Must I make and mail paper copies as well? If we are to transition into electronic maps there remains some thinking to do.

The question of review by the vice-chairs remains. Will the electronic files be sent to them for checking?

Frankly, a much larger problem for me is the half-page certificates. While they save paper and consolidate forms at the certifier and Vice Chair level, they make the scanning process a major headache. I'd much rather deal with an electronic map than one of those.

Once Neville and I hammered out the size requirements for the map, which are pretty inflexible for reasons of web storage and viewability and other technical stuff, it went fairly smoothly. As long as I remembered I had the files in the first place (Post-It notes) there wasn't a problem on my end with the electronic map. In fact, it was one less map to scan.

Half-page certificates and follow-up maps, on the other hand, cause a lot of extra work. Without whining too much, I'll just say that each page takes about 10 minutes to process instead of two, and a stack of them is not my favorite sight.

Kill a few trees, guys. For me?

Keith has now set up a link on "printing" at the top of the map page so that clicking on it produces a perfect print.