Thursday, May 17, 2012

Crowd-sourced knowledge units.

We're looking for a yard on the island and saw Barron's. Anyone know anything about them, good/bad?
One handy tool for finding out info is Active Captain. It's a crowd-sourced map of maritimey/navigational goodness. The accounts are free and the information is/can be great. Being crowd-sourced, it is only as good as the info people share. Last-last summer, we moored at the Port Washington town moorings for the weekend- and as there wasn't a lot of info for their location/regulations, I added some. Other things that are nice are people marking obstructions which may or may not appear accurately on GPS and charts. "shallow rock", "sand bar, we got stuck, lost a prop.. ", "here be dragons" etc.

Another system, similar to what Active Captain provides is Ushahidi, an opensourced mapping/crowd-sourcing solution that is malleable to whatever needs you may have; disaster relief is one example. Themable, modular, and awesome.


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