This website aims to fill a gap in Eventor’s functionality to more easily manage multi-event orienteering carnivals, such as the Easter 3-Days and the Australian Orienteering Championships.

Eventor is the Swedish Orienteering Federation’s central IT system, which handles orienteering event calendar, entries, results and reporting. The system is constantly updated with new functionality. Eventor is licenced for use by Orienteering Australia to manage orienteering events in Australia, and the Orienteering Australia instance of Eventor is separate to the two other international associations that also use this software – the Swedish Orienteering Federation and the International Orienteering Federation.

In 2015, Eureka Orienteers in Ballarat was appointed as the coordinating club for the 2015 Australian Orienteering Championships Carnival, which was also known as “Dr Blake’s Mystery Tour“. This carnival was hosted around Ballarat and the Central Highlands region in Victoria. I was involved closely in the IT for that carnival, and as is usual for carnivals of this size, an efficient method of working with the anticipated hundreds of entries across multiple events was required. After wrangling data out of Eventor into various Excel spreadsheets and a seemingly endless amount of data massaging, I thought “… there must be a better way” to extract, organise and view the data needed from Eventor dynamically, as it was being updated on Eventor by incoming entries, uploaded start lists, bib assignments, results, etc.

I also wanted to produce a modern-day equivalent of the old “Carnival Handbook”, that clubs used to produce in past years, where all the entered competitors were listed, alphabetically and by Age Class, with their assigned start times for every event. The handbook was usually hand-typed and assembled, and sent out by post some weeks before each carnival. Containing essential per-event information, similar to today’s Carnival Bulletins, plus tourism information and event directions, plus the start lists, your handbook was always the No 1 essential item to keep nearby, in your sports bag or in the car.

The result of this thinking was a very early version of this website, hand-coded purely for the 2015 carnival and hosted alongside the Eureka Orienteers club website. It was acutely performance-challenged, as the web server was simply not designed for such heavy data wrangling! As entries steadily grew, from a few, to a few dozen, to nearly 1000, the performance steadily stagnated, from a few seconds early on, to taking nearly 15 minutes to download all the data from Eventor and build the pages, by the time the carnival started! During the carnival week, performance and bandwidth became major issues, with both Eventor and Eureka’s web servers exceeding the capabilities of their hosting plans on several occasions. But the “My Carnival” website proved very useful, to both the organisers and competitors, so the concept was sound at least!

Victoria typically hosts major carnivals approximately every seven years. The next Australian Championships held in Victoria was the 2022 Australian Championships Carnival across the Central Highlands region, and the same website was revised to improve the performance. It successfully handled a total of 1051 competitors across 16 orienteering events and 6 non-competitive extra events. While it was not promoted to competitors on this occasion, to keep the performance issues under control, it proved invaluable to the organisers, and the idea of developing a dedicated website for the concept was first considered. The 2023 Australian Championships Carnival organisers in WA also used the facility, then a complete redevelopment of the website occurred starting in mid-2024, just in time to assist the 2024 Australian Championships Carnival hosted in NSW. This redevelopment also catered for the Australian 3-Days multi-day event format and is hosted on a dedicated sub-domain of orienteering.asn.au. The 2025 Easter 3-Days in Victoria should be able to fully use the website for organisers and competitors, and future carnivals can also take advantage of it.

Why is this even needed? Eventor’s architecture is strongly event-driven. Eventor holds data for numerous orienteering events held and planned across Australia, and each event’s information, classes, entries, start lists and results are separately managed, by accessing each event individually. This is perfectly acceptable for organising and entering the usual single-day event. However, Eventor does not currently cater well for accessing and managing multiple events and entries together, when they are associated as part of a carnival structure. For example, if a competitor has entered six events, and wants to see all six entries together on a single page, this is currently impossible to do in Eventor.

The Australian Orienteering Championships Carnival, for example, is typically held across two adjacent weekends and the week between, during the school holidays in late September / early October each year. It usually includes the following events:

• Australian Championships events in each of the Foot Orienteering disciplines – Long Distance, Middle Distance, Sprint Distance and Relays – one or more of which may also be accredited by the IOF as World Ranking Events for elite-level competitors.
• The Australian Schools Orienteering Championships, which includes National Schools Championships events in the long, sprint and relay disciplines. These are typically held mid-week, between the National Championship weekends.
• Public races, typically held on the same days and maps as the Schools Championships events. These often form a 2- or 3-race cumulative series, similar to the Easter 3-Days, but a lot more informal.
• Optionally, one or more State-Level championships events of the hosting state, to take advantage of the carnival occasion.
• Optionally, one or more novelty or themed events, such as Victoria’s 2022 “Orienteering Grand Prix”, or special fundraising events, such as the “Run For Hannah” fundraising event held for Hannah Goddard in Victoria in 2015.
• Optionally, Eventor is also used to gather orders and payments for non-orienteering carnival-related extras, such as carnival dinner bookings, carnival clothing and merchandise orders, SI stick hire, camping and accommodation bookings, development workshops, special interest presentations, early- or late-start requests for parents, child-minding and string course entries, etc.

Using Eventor by itself, event organisers and competitors alike need to access each of the carnival’s events separately, to gather information relating to participation across a carnival. This website aims to collate the carnival event information from Eventor into consolidated pages, including the following:

• An Entries Summary, that lists key information about every competitor entered in one or more carnival events on a single page. This summary can be filtered and sorted in different ways to answer typical organiser questions, eg show me competitors entered in WRE Elite classes that don’t have an IOF Eventor account set up, show me competitors that are using more than one SI stick across the carnival events, show me just the elites, or just the schools championships entrants, etc.
• An individual Personal Entries Page for every carnival competitor, that displays all entries, start times, results, extras and service item orders, on a single bookmarkable page, per person.
• An Extras Summary page, that lists all “entries” (orders) for non-orienteering carnival-related “extra” items and service items, ordered on any carnival event, on a single page.
• Several Summary pages, designed to assist carnival organisers to view the entire field of competitors in different ways, such as sorted by SI Card, Start Time, Class, Placing, Result, etc, and progressive graphs of entries received over time.
• Quick links to essential information hosted on Eventor or elsewhere, such as carnival homepages, carnival bulletins and information documents.
• Quick links to Eventor, to directly access relevant Eventor pages such as class- or club-filtered start lists, results, etc.

Technically, this website is able to work with Individual Single-Day, Relay Single-Day and Individual Multi-Day event types. These three event types cover nearly all events typically set up for orienteering competitions in Australia. Other event types that Eventor caters for, such as Team formats, may be added in future if demand requires.

Lastly, what’s with the name? When I registered the new hosting plan to redevelop the site, it came with a free .info domain name, so I had to think fast and invent something on the spot! “lavicOrn” (pronounced “Lah-Vee-Corn”, I think…) is a simple anagram of “O Carnival”, and the moniker also gives a nod to its Victorian origins.

I hope this facility proves useful to carnival organisers and competitors alike.

If you have feedback or a suggestion for additional screens or functions, please complete and submit a Feedback form.

Regards, Ian Chennell (Eureka Orienteers, Ballarat, Victoria, March 2025)