Hi again,
2Bish. Amazing work with the icons added in Tasmania. Not only are they numerous (50+) but the quality of information and the way you display it is excellent. You've single handedly created a useful source of sailing information for that region in Tasmania. Well done. We have plans for bringing in more information to that Tasmanian region shortly. I will keep everyone updated about that.
I can see that some are concerned about the future of ZW and I have make a statement as to the free nature of Zulu Waterways and our commitment to keep it that way at. You can find it at the bottom of this post.
As for the open nature of ZW, 'Open Sourced' is not the exact term I would use for what Zulu is. Technically it is not opened sourced because the source code of the software can not be copied or altered by the public. However, sharing of information from Zulu Waterways is permitted and even facilitated by the site, such as sharing icons via Facebook and coping icon links to share in email or elsewhere. Links to, and information from the site can be posted on peoples blogs, websites, social media pages and forums etc. We want the information shared in this way and have tried to facilitate this. What we can not allow is the information copied on mass and put on another platform such as a big company wanting to steal all the data. From fear of this we must protect the data in certain ways, but not in any way that affects individual sailors using the data.
I wanted to address some of the other worries expressed by some here as they are completely understandable. We see this sort of thing happen all the time all around us, the big fish eating up fresh new ideas and community fuelled projects, turning them into money making machines. Often destroying the services true value in the process. I think most of us who choose this life on the water detest this kind of world and in some small part at lease, sail to escape it. It is our hope that ZW can be an exception to this trend. Along side words and promises, I can only ask that people try to have faith in our intentions with ZW and trust that we will constant work towards keeping it clean, increasingly useful and free to use.
In saying that, it should be understood that ZW will need to have a revenue source in order to handle it's growth and to add new functions, such as an offline version which is in the making. The amount of work that goes into developing and maintaining a platform like ZW is huge. It's took a year of work to build the actual bones of the program and it takes a constant daily effort to maintain it, deal with the data input and respond to users etc. The costs and work involved will just increase as the service becomes more popular.
In a perfect world we would love to be able to copy the Wiki model of donation based income and see the users of ZW contributing towards the cause with donations, and then crowd fund for new functions and features (such as offline mode). Of course a platform like Wiki works with a much greater population and I fear we would never see enough donations to cover all the costs due to the relatively small amount of boaters. This is still a possible means of revenue. Unfortunately, while we see the beach bod bikini sailors make tens of thousands from youtube videos, a sophisticated service such as ZW which adds so many benefits to so many sailors might not get the same response. And given the current state of the web people expect everything for free often not realising that they are actually paying in full, just in other ways (personal data sold to the highest bidder). I would be interested in people thoughts on the matter.
There are other common methods used to fund services like ZW. In short the method is to charge the people who make money from the service. These are the businesses who gain extra exposure through users finding them on the site. On Zulu this would be marinas, slips way, chandleries etc. If we were to implement this method on Zulu we would have to charge the businesses who are displayed on Zulu to have their icons contain extra functions such as links to their website, photos and cost of fuel at their bowser etc. They would benefit from having an icon with better functions and easier methods for users to contact them. They would NOT have any control however over the content of the icon, nor the comments/experiences left by sailors. This is quite a clean method of funding and is so commonly used as it keeps the site free to use and only affects the people who are making money of you anyway. It's not as clean as the donations model though.
Another model would be to share the information from ZW with chart plotters and other marine apps/programs. This would give people access to ZW information on their plotter of choice while providing funds for the ZW project. Whether revenue could be sourced in this way is an unknown and much would have to be figured out in order to protect ZW's integrity.
We haven't made any decisions concerning how to move forward with the funding issue. Any thoughts are welcome. Thanks to everyone who is contributing and using the service.
If anyone is interested, we are looking for people to write 'location overviews' which is a new icon type designed to display a broader overview of a sailing destination. We have discovered the need for this as the amount of information has grown. The overview offers a means to filter through the information following the advise of a knowledgeable local sailor. Within the icon can be links to other icons in the area and advise on the sorts of vessels able to access it and the best anchorages etc. If anyone feels they know their local waterway well enough to write one get in touch with us or just add it as an icon type yourself. Here is an example of one I've started for the Clarence River.
Clarence River
zuluwaterways.com/map/icon/5ac02604c101f104c22f643d/location-overview-clarence-river-yamba~2Filuka-and-beyond. Here is my statement of intent to keep Zulu Waterways forever free to use. The information on and the platform Zulu Waterways (both the crowd sourced and the official information added by us at Zulu), found at www.zuluwaterways.com and the associated iOS and Android apps will remain free to access, use and modify (in the way of editing and adding to the information, not modifying the programming) by the public. There will be no restrictions or costs for this service, not now nor in the future. - Nicholas Baillie Jackson and Lauren Durbridge, Zulu Waterways founders.
