Turf insider February 2021

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Round winners

Congratulations to the winners of round 127: KRALJICA from Skåne turfed home her third Gold, Björke from Östergötland turfed home his second Silver and floramcml added a Bronze to his Silver. All medal winners turfed home over 1 million points. Well done, mates! In addition, four turfers on Top Ten this round were not from Sweden, things are changing :)

Turf Bonanza 2021

I am sure many were as disappointed as me when the Turf Bonanza 2020 had to be cancelled last year. Turf Crew is pleased to announce that the newly formed association Örebro Turfers (not to be confused with Örebro Turfförening) will host the world championship in Turf - Turf Bonanza 2021. The event will be held on September 4, in Örebro Sweden. Save the date and book travel/accommodation right away. More information about this long awaited event will be released in springtime. Welcome to Örebro!

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Turf Award 2021

Don't forget to nominate your favorites to Turf Awards 2021.Turf Award is awarded to turfers who have made significant or particularly attentive achievements during the previous year, or have been involved in an especially noted or spectacular zone takeover. Candidates are nominated by all turfers who also appoint the winners by voting. Turf Award is handed over to the winners by Turf Crew at the Bonanza banquet in Örebro September 4, 2021. Turf Award will be awarded in the following categories:

Best Turf achievement of the year 2020

Awarded to the Turfer who, for example, got the most gold medals, monthly medals, has taken the most zones, unique zones, regions or equivalent in 2020.

Turf Star of the Year 2020

Awarded to the Turfer who started turfing as a newbie in 2020 and has made the fastest progress during the year.

Turfer of the Year 2020

An open category to nominate a Turfer that exceled in an exemplary way without any connections to an individual Turf performance. This award can be given for anything, for example: efforts to spread Turf, marketing, organizing Turf events or a Turfer who has helped and supported others in a special way.

Most Spectacular Zone Takeover of the Year 2020

Awarded to the Turfer, who has completed one of the most notable or spectacular zone takes in 2020.

Nomination procedure

In February 2021, all turfers have the opportunity to submit proposals on who should be nominated for the Turf Award in the different categories. A nomination proposal must include nickname and a brief motivation based on nomination criteria above. Link to the Google forms for proposing candidates can be found here (open up January 26 and closes February 25 2021).

Voting procedure and announcement of winners

In March 2021, Turf Crew nominates a maximum of five candidates in each category. During April all turfers will be given the opportunity to vote for which of the nominees who should be awarded the Turf Award in each category. Link to voting form can be found here (open up April 1 and closes April 30 2021).

Turf Expansion in UK, Germany and the rest of the world

No one can have missed the huge expansion in the UK in the last few months. Turf is also starting to take off in Germany. This has resulted in huge amounts of new zones in these two countries. UK and Germany are official Turf countries, so a major focus lately by the zone makers has been to supply the newbies in these particularly these two countries with zones. Turf was also at the end of 2020 made available to download in over 50 countries it hadn't been available in before. New turfers have been popping up in these countries too, often far away from any zones. A new feature to help these turfers were introduced in the app: a message to the turfer if there were no zones within a couple of kilometers, to write to Turf Crew and ask for zones in their area. About 20 such requests have been made and acted upon. Some newbies have found the Forum and asked for zones there. It also became a bit of a sport among the zone makers to watch Turf-TV and spot newbies in zoneless areas and give them a zone or ten ;)

Because of the expansion, all hands on deck were required and because zone making is 100% volunteer work, several zone makers have focused on UK and Germany (and the rest of the world) instead of the Swedish zone allotment during December 2020 to February 2021. But rest assured, the zone allotments will be met, albeit later in 2021. Turf Crew has also been busy training seven new zone makers from three different countries, again with special focus on UK and Germany. The enthusiasm among our new zone makers is great to see! Soon we will let some of them loose in Sweden too, and you might already have seen some of them sporting the black C(rew) shirt in the app.

Turf in Social Media

Once upon a long time ago, Drassen (one of the founders of Turf), set up a Facebook group named Turf, with Turf Crew as moderators. It has now been renamed and sports the lovely name ”Turf – Outdoor Addiction”. This is as official as a Facebook group can be for the International Turf community. Any language is welcome for posts, but most are in Swedish since for almost 10 years, Turf has been predominately played in Sweden or by Swedes living abroad. New rules were introduced in December to some members chagrin, Turf Crew is still trying them out. With over 25 moderators, the group needs some basic rules to hold on to. There are loads of other Turf groups on Facebook; for countries, regions or special interests.


Turf also has other official accounts in other social media:

https://www.facebook.com/Turfthegame

https://instagram.com/turfcrew

https://twitter.com/turf_game

Some less active than others ;)

Suggesting Zones in the Forum

Suggesting zones in the Forum is one of the main roads to get the attention of a zone maker. The other being using the suggestion button (light bulb) in the Turf app to suggest good spots for new zones. But remember, these are only suggestions, and a great way to help zone makers not familiar with your area to find those extra special spots. The better you promote it, often by a post in the Forum, the more likely a zone maker will see it and act upon it. But zone makers are under no obligation whatsoever to make your zone suggestion become a reality. There is no general policy about zone making in non-Turf countries, it happens now and then when someone 'gets a feeling'.

Zone makers are like cats, difficult to tell them what to do and even though some are public about their 'job', others are not and this wish to be somewhat anonymous needs to be respected. It is never ok to contact a zone maker privately. Contact zone makers via public channels, such as the Turf Forum or the issue system. Zone makers get only the fancy black C(rew) shirt in the Turf app as thanks for the many hours of work they put in for the Turf community. It's not only about making those zones, you know. Turf Crew handles issues, organizes the [Turf Award]], act on abuse complaints, organizes school Events, look after the TurfWiki, warded and the Forum, and write the monthly Turf insider ;)

Turf divides the world into Country (Sweden), Region (Västerbotten) and Area (Umeå). In Sweden, the Areas are our municipalities. In other countries the areas can be defined differently. The areas are 'discovered' when a zone is placed in the zone making tool, and for example in Northern Ireland, a new area is 'discovered' every second zone, so the algorithm defining the area still needs some work.

The Turf Forum has now been equipped with subgroups for each Region in the Official Turf countries. For the best result when you post about your zone suggestions in the Forum, find the country and region, then write the town and area (”kommun” in Swedish) in the title of your post. In Sweden, we have for as long as I've been zone maker, had ”kommunansvar”/”municipality (area) responsibility” for zone making and we change every four months. We no longer have region responsibility in Sweden, if someone still remembers those old days. In other countries, due to much less activity, zone makers have had the same region for a longer time period, some even have entire countries(!). That is about to change, I've been told. With more zone makers, we can rotate responsibilities abroad as well as in Sweden. This will assure zones of every variety, since each zone maker has their own flair when it comes to making zones :)

So, to recap: apply for an account at Turf Forum, find your country section of interest, find the Zones section, find the Region you want to make a zone suggestion in and write a post asking nicely for zones in your specific area. The post should as a minimum have a title with town and area in it so that the zone maker responsible for that area can easily find it. If you suggest one zone or many, does not matter so much, but we like zone suggestions with a bit of local history. Pictures are nice, but difficult to upload in the forum, add a link instead if you can :)

A zone maker colleague of mine thinks the optimal zone suggestion contains: location (on a map or with coordinates, or a link to eg open street map. Personally, I want the name of the closest existing zone so I can easily look for it in the zone making tool), a nice motivation for the zone, a picture or historical map and please, please a local name suggestion of a maximum of 13 characters. Local names are often tied nicely to the location and are less likely to already exist somewhere else.

Digital Turf Meetings

For lots of turfers the monthly or even weekly Turf get-togethers such as Turf Fika, Turf Beer or Turf Brunch came to a more or less abrupt end with the Covid-19 pandemic last year. Instead some turfers are now gathering online, in digital meetings. In Uppsala and Västmanland the monthly get-together was digital in January. I asked two turfers to contribute with their take on digital meetings. Enjoy!

Safe board meetings during a pandemic by Ninetail, Umeå, Västerbotten

In order to have as broad a geographical representation as possible, the board of Turf Västerbotten consists of turfers from Umeå, Skellefteå and Öravan. This means that even before the pandemic struck, some of us either had to travel far or participate via cell phone or using other solutions. If you have participated in a meeting via cell phone, you know that it does not work perfectly. It became even more difficult when at the beginning of the pandemic we switched to keeping at least two chairs distance between all meeting participants - it simply became impossible to place the cell phone so that everyone could hear and be heard.


When firmer restrictions were imposed in Sweden, we realized that it was time to try to find a more sustainable solution. We chose Microsoft Teams, as the service offers both document storage and opportunity for digital meetings. The most recent board meetings have been completely digital and the technology has worked well. The degree of participation in the meetings has increased as no one needs to travel and you can participate even if you have symptoms. In fact, it has also become easier to work with common documents during meetings. One problem that remains to be solved is how to sign physical documents. For the time being, we have appointed members to check the minutes who live close to each other so that they can meet afterwards. Preparations are currently underway for the annual meeting. This will also be digital this year. Hopefully this means that even more turfers from all over the region have the opportunity to participate - our goal is to be an association for the whole region of Västerbotten. There is certainly much more you can do digitally as well, even if what we probably long for most is to be able to meet physically and eat or turf together.

Report from Digital Turf meeting in Uppsala by mpmoke

There has been few Turf meetings in Uppsala during 2020 due to the pandemic and it is sorely missed. As a turfer, you want to meet up with your fellow turfers now and then over brunch, coffee or a beer, and dive into nerdy Turf talk, share zone shots, talk about purple coloring of the zones in warded, missions, celebrate region round winners, welcome new turfers and hang out with all the turfers! Many have had digital meetings with work, school, relatives and friends and why not do it with the whole Turf gang?! I myself am most used to Zoom and think it has worked best of the programs I have tried. To avoid people talking in each other's mouths and having some kind of control, a simple program was suggested where we would have a simple quiz game, someone would tell us about odd zone takes. The entire Turf meeting would be limited to about 1 hour. The invitation was made via our local Hangout and a post in the local Facebook group Turf Uppsala.

Wednesday 13 January came around and the start time was 19. 14 connected and with some there were several people, a total of 17 people. Then there were some who logged in quickly as well. I heard and saw everyone but some had trouble hearing some others, most likely due to settings or odd operating systems. I did a slide show from Turf meetings and Bonanza from as early as 2013. We identified turfers and were amazed that many have hung around for such a long time. Others were identified as former turfers. After about an hour and a half, the participants thought it was appropriate to round off this first digital Turf meeting in Uppsala.

Overall, I think it was a successful and pleasant Turf meeting. Well worth repeating. What you can think of is to try to test sound and image before the meeting, turn off the mic when you do not intend to talk to avoid drowning out those who talk, have an agenda for the meeting to steer up a little and get people started. We used Zoom, but it may be worth trying other programs as well. The main thing is that we met in some way and kept the geek going until we can meet for real again when the pandemic has blown over.

Upcoming Region Battle in March

In March Region Scotland will battle Region Skåne during four weeks, so don't be surprised if the Top 100 will be filled with turfers from Scotland and Skåne :) The Region teams and battle can be followed on turfportalen.se. Read more here about the set up. May the best team win!

Turfa lugnt!/Safe turfing!

//Munin

...if you want to contribute to future Turf insiders, send your story to insider@turfgame.com :)