Category: Blog

I’ve been gradually working on understanding and refining the strategies the ATBA-UK uses in it’s various functions and am at a stage now where I can begin to document them properly. The aim is to produce written strategy documents for Business, Events, Marketing, Membership, and Standards. These documents will all work together to form the overall strategy that the ATBA-UK follows in its work and provide some business sustainability for when the current committee members move on and are replaced by other volunteers. Having what we’ve done, how we did it, and why, written down to pass on means any future committee should be able to continue without all the difficulties we faced when we took over.

Although I been adding to each of the strategies for a while, it’s only recently that I’ve been working on the Membership Strategy that I’ve found a format that seems to work. Each document is split into two sections; Strategy and Workflow. The strategy contains an Introduction to the strategy, the Aim and Objectives for the function, its Goals, Critical Success Factors, Implementation, Measures and Future Developments. The Workflow contains all the information a person would need to take over a function like Membership and run it. It breaks down how the systems are set up, what the person managing the function needs to do, and what schedule they should work to.

These documents will change as part of an ongoing process of reviewing and updating our procedures, but by the end of the process we should be able to produce ‘A Guide To Running The ATBA-UK’ which will become a very useful resource for guiding the current and future committee.

I recently sent the 48th email newsletter. Forty eight emails, one a month for four years. Four years of working for the ATBA-UK. Four years of getting more and more involved, developing better understanding of the ATBA-UK as a business, understanding the ATBA-UK as a community-building organisation, and working on strategies that will achieve the ATBA-UK’s mission of supporting the growth of mountainboarding in the UK.

So, what’s next? Another four years? Yeah, I hope so. My personal mission is to achieve Sport England recognition for mountainboarding and get the ATBA-UK set up to run as a sustainable business with all its strategies, policies and procedures in place and well documented. If that takes another five or ten years, then that’s fine by me.

More people are starting to become interested in Nompa’s and set about building them. Since my discussion with Constantin, Dale has started building his Nompa (and a fine looking beast it is too), and even long-time noSno rider Dave McBean has been considering it.

All this Nompa activity is inspiring me to make another one. I think it would be more Downhill orientated, perhaps to take the place of Fatman. I think I would use a 15 degree deck again and trim it to be able to take my noSno brakes, and have some good twist in the middle. It would be a bit longer than my current Nompa (which to be fair is shorter than most kids boards) and probably have a bit more ground clearance than Dale’s just because of the nose and tail angle, which will give it less steering. I think, for shaping, I might go with a nicely rounded, longboard-style, deck shape.

I’ve even thought about starting a website about Nompa’s, although as Dale pointed out, there would only be five of us who would look at it. That might be a bit too ultra-niche to put the time and effort into it. I still think that all the knowledge we are generating from building Nompa’s should be recorded, even down the details of lengths of noSno wheel bolts, but maybe it doesn’t need it’s own website. Maybe I’ll just spend some time measuring and recording as many details about things like hub width and binding positions and put it all on this blog.

I guess we’ll see if I get time to do anything.