The international governing body World Skate is adopting Dropbox Sign to have agreements with athletes and member federations signed digitally. The function is connected to the Infinity platform via API. According to the federation, administrative workload falls by more than 100 hours per year.
Dropbox and World Skate have announced a partnership. The international governing body for skateboarding and roller sports plans to use Dropbox Sign to handle agreements with athletes and member federations worldwide electronically. Through the Dropbox Sign API, it embeds the signature function directly in Infinity, its central platform for athlete and event management. According to the announcement, users go through the process in World Skate’s own branding.
The federation is headquartered in Lausanne, Switzerland. By its own account, it has around 137 national member federations. About 10,000 athletes take part in world championships each year. World Skate represents disciplines including skateboarding, scootering, freestyle skating, speed skating, rink and inline hockey, and artistic roller skating.
How the registration process works
Athletes and member federations are to sign documents on event requirements, regulations and participation agreements electronically in future. Once signed, the documents and their status are returned to Infinity. This allows World Skate to manage registrations within its overall tournament workflow. The integration is intended to support processes around world championships and the Olympic Games.
Jim Rudall, Head of EMEA at Dropbox, sees the solution as a consistent way to conclude agreements. He says it also improves transparency, security and traceability for the organization. This is the vendor’s assessment.
More departments to follow
World Skate is currently extending its use of Dropbox Sign to human resources, legal, sponsorship and finance. Planned use cases are HR documents, legal agreements, commercial contracts with sponsors and partners, and finance documents that require a signature. Teams are to get a more uniform process from handling to completion and avoid manual handovers between departments.
For the rollout, the federation is working with Topix, a Dropbox channel partner. The company focuses on digital document and business processes and, according to the announcement, has long experience in the media and communications sector.
The federation’s assessment
President Sabatino Aracu points to the number of agreements and documents the federation manages throughout the year across its global network of member federations, athletes, organizers and partners. The agreement with Dropbox is meant to make these processes simpler, faster and more efficient and to support further growth.
Elisabetta Mariani, Director of Operations, describes the previous situation: signatures ran through a separate manual process. With Dropbox Sign, documents are easier to manage, track and retrieve. She puts the saving in administrative effort at more than 100 hours per year. The figure comes from the federation and has not been independently verified.
Assessment
The announcement reflects a common pattern: instead of a separate tool, the signature service becomes a building block of an existing specialist platform. In Infinity, registration, signature and document status come together, so the federation can check the state of individual cases in one place. How far the workload actually falls depends on the scale of use and on acceptance among athletes and federations. The federation gives no concrete timelines for the further departments.
Dr. Jakob Jung is Editor-in-Chief of Security Storage and Channel Germany. He has been working in IT journalism for more than 20 years. His career includes Computer Reseller News, Heise Resale, Informationweek, Techtarget (storage and data center) and ChannelBiz. He also freelances for numerous IT publications, including Computerwoche, Channelpartner, IT-Business, Storage-Insider and ZDnet. His main topics are channel, storage, security, data center, ERP and CRM.
Contact via Mail: jakob.jung@security-storage-und-channel-germany.de