OpenBeta and LCOs

How OpenBeta plans to collaborate with Local Climbing Organizations

Why do we care about LCOs?

Local Climbing Organizations (LCOs) play an indispensable role in maintaining, conserving, and promoting climbing areas. They work tirelessly to ensure that climbers have access to safe bolts and that climbers are acting sustainably in the areas they love to climb in. LCOs often collaborate with land managers, landowners, and other stakeholders to address a range of issues, including access, conservation, and education. Some of the key functions and benefits of LCOs include:

1. Access management: LCOs work to establish and maintain relationships with landowners, land managers, and other stakeholders to secure and maintain access to climbing areas. They may negotiate agreements, establish access trails, or create parking to minimize conflicts and ensure continued access for climbers.

2. Route maintenance and development: LCOs are responsible for maintaining the quality and safety of climbing routes. This can involve bolting, re-bolting, and anchor replacement, as well as cleaning and stabilizing loose rock.

3. Conservation and stewardship: Every climbing area has its own unique set of conservation concerns. LCOs ensure that climbers are aware of relevant issues and work to mitigate the impact of climbing on the environment.

4. Community building and education: LCOs often host events, workshops, and climbing festivals to bring the local climbing community together.

The work that LCOs do is critical for the longevity of outdoor climbing in any given area, so it makes sense that we try and work with LCOs and support their efforts on the ground in any way we can.

What are we planning?

To start with, we'd like to bring LCOs onto OpenBeta.io and increase their visibility to climbers browsing an area. LCOs will be able to link to their website and social media accounts, and climbers will be able to see which LCOs are active in a given area. We plan to allow LCOs to maintain their own entries so that they can keep information up to date. You can see our work so far on a page like this, where Boulder Climbing Community shows up as an LCO that is active in the area. A user can click straight through to the LCO's website from here.

In the future, LCOs will be able to list specific calls to action that will be reachable more quickly and uniformly on the OpenBeta platform.

This lays a good foundation to build on, and will hopefully allow us to build tools specifically for LCOs that will help them do their work more efficiently. The project is still evolving as we talk with more LCOs and find out what they want to see come out of this collaboration, and if you (yes, you) have any good ideas that you reckon should go in the pipeline, you can visit our GitHub or join us on Discord

Are you an LCO?

If you represent an LCO, we’d love to hear from you! Click below to fill out a quick form