Contributors wanted: Develop editor for creative commons database of kiting spots

ivo

Depreciated: We have not succeeded to find any help among our community

The problem

We have a lot of demands and complaints that kiting spots on Windy do not contain any further details, and that you have no chance to add a new kiting spot. We believe that there is a widespread demand for a free creative commons database of kiting / windsurfing / snowkiting spots.

We believe that this creative commons database can help other kiting buddies to avoid all dangers associated with this sport.

Solution

If you are a programmer, wanting to help other kiters, we would be happy if you decide to develop an open source web application for adding / editing kiting spots.

How this should work?

You will develop a web application for adding and editing spots, using the technology you like. The codes of the app should be, in our opinion, open sourced and hosted on gitHub.
The condition is that the resulting spot database is creative commons and it is easy for any other party to download and use the database.
Windy will provide free hosting for these apps with a nice domain name spots.windy.com
Windy will provide our own kiting spots database (4000+ spots) that you can import to database for start.
Windy will derive the link from www.windy.com to spots.windy.com in order to guarantee that this site will have its users and spots contributors.
Windy will enable you to use registration and authentication of windy.com, so that you don't need to develop it yourself.
Windy will send you a Windy cap and a Windy towel (the only swag we have so far).

What the database should contain

We believe that such a database should contain structured data including the type of spot (waves/flat/chop), wind directions, waves directions, riding seasons, spot description, dangers, and so on.

The inspiration can be kiteforum.com that does exactly the same, but unfortunately as proprietary data. As you can see, Kiteforum collects way too much data about each spot. We believe that less information about each spot will motivate more kiters to contribute.

_center

How to proceed

Just let us know that you are interested and we can go!

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adrien

Hi Windy,

My name is Adrien and I have just created a listing website that may be similar from what your are looking for: https://www.wind-buddy.com/

I am now helping kitesurfing schools to showcase their schools for free and we have more than 100 schools registered: https://www.wind-buddy.com/kitesurfing-schools/

In our submission process, it is possible to add field for different type of listing and thus it wouldn't be a problem to create a new form for kitesurfing spots.

With request of our users, we are also trying to launch an event submission.

Finally, our goal is to help people to kitesurf and progress without spending a ridiculous amount of money by sharing kitesurf equipment. Thus, I would not mind to create an open source for kitesurfing spot as I believe in sharing staff with everyone.
You can see on example of the school there. An interesting thing is that every user can add pictures and also comment in a review (which could be changed in a chat room) https://www.wind-buddy.com/kitesurf-school/kiteboarding-school-hotel-madagascar-kite-alize/

Let me know if you think this is in line with what you are looking for

And cheers for your awesome map!!

ivo

@adrien If you could integrate add/edit spot feature to your website and guarantee that resulted spot database will be free for all as Creative Commons we would be more than happy.

ivo

wind-buddy seems little bit slow from EU (yesterday). Where is it hosted?

ant1

Hi!

I am working on liveforwind.com. I was about to start adding the new spot feature and voting for a spot's ratings.
The core idea is to display the flight prices and there are still issues on that front as the large number of calls can make the app a bit laggy (and the API I use is shutting down) but for the community side it should be good in no time. Let me know what you think!

PS your iframe is already in there, Obviously :-)

ivo

@ant1 @adrien As I understand both of your projects are commercial and compete to each other. I understand, that links from Windy will help to grow your traffic & build your brand. I think that a lot of kiters wanting to contribute would be reluctant to be part of this project.

My question is, are you able to make `spots.windy.com` kind of neutral and free and community based brand? I mean like Wikipedia is. Much more simpler design and navigation than your respective sites, no advertisement with just one functionality: add spot/edit spot. And I also believe that the site running on `windy.com` domain will greatly help to motivate all the contributors.

Of course I feel, that you would like to profit somehow by creating this site, which can be done by some co-branding of the site like: powered by wind-buddy.com or powered by liveforwind.com with respective links to your site.

lvallejo

@ivo Hey Ivo, I can help creating a new web app/ website / database for spots, all open source of course. I am programmer with 8 years of experience and would like to help the wind community.

ivo

@lvallejo This would be great. You seem like "neutral" person, not pursuing some commercial interests.

Are there any web apps that you have created already?

Can we help you with anything?

Do you want to help with UI ideas, or you are able to invent everything yourself?

Should we send you our spots database in JSON?

Which Timezone you live? The best would be if I could make you a phone call. If you send me a phone number via Private Message would be good, or you can find me on facebook as Ivo Lukacovic

Ivo

ant1

@ivo Not really commercial, no. The ad is just my friend's company! Put it there to improve his SEO, Can remove in a second. Totally happy taking out the flight search for spots.windy and creating the CRUD interface.

ivo

@ant1 Send my your phone number via private message, will give you a call

adrien

@ivo wind-buddy.com is hosted on OVH which is, indeed, not a super host.

There are no problem for me to create a separate website spot.windy.com which could be running by the fall of next week. I will need less features on this website such as booking, marketplace, point management and thus the spot.windy.com would be a lot faster! Each spot page would still have features such as adding pictures - video - gps, a chat box and all the field you need (+ every members can add pictures)

I won't be able to invest in a better host but I can invest my time and money in the development for the new, free and secure website, for the community
Before creating the new website, I would just need to know exactly what information you want the spot to contain (flat, wage, chopy, wind dirrection, danger ...) which filter you want to use to search them and which information the user's profile should contain.

let me know how we can proccessed further or how could we have a chat ?

May the wind be with you :)

ExtremeSport

@ivo
Hi Ivo,
I was just wondering if you've managed to make any progress on this project? I recently created https://www.extremesportsearch.com/ which is a crowd-sourced project for extreme sport locations around the world. I can sympathise how hard it is to get users to collaborate, and I think that your creative commons approach is probably favoured by most.
My understanding is that you want a small web application and database residing on your servers, with all of the code open-source and hosted on GitHub. I'm very happy to collaborate with you on this and can easily create an application for you. I'm based in the UK and available to talk next week if you're interested.
All the best,
Paul