Can you help bring Olly the Octopus to life?

Ben Ramsden, founder of Swim.Rocks, is calling on the swimming community to help make the dream of a fully automated timekeeping solution a reality.

Each year, more than 22,000 volunteers are needed to fulfil timekeeping duties at swimming events across Australia. While timekeeping is a necessary part of the sport, it can be a huge headache for clubs to find enough volunteers and manage the administrative burden of manually collecting and processing timesheets.

Ben believes there is a better way and that an automated solution is both possible and within reach.

“We hope to achieve the development of a new system that allows automatic timekeeping. It’s a dream shared by many people that would make such a difference to the sport and a massive difference to club committee members’ lives,” Ben said.

“Current solutions are clunky and expensive. Replacing these is not only a lovely thing to do, but it’s within reach and it should be possible at a much lower cost. We can’t rely on existing suppliers to innovate. We’ve just got to come together as a community and make it happen.

“We need innovators, we need investors and we need friends.”

See Swimming NSW