First project: Open Divers

I’m back from a week on the red sea in Marsa Shagra, Egypt. We did mostly scuba diving (2 or 3 per day). Check my pictures on flickr. And with this first project, I decided to stay a little longer in the scuba diving world.

Let’s start this diving project!

The idea

I am a passionate diver with around 70 dives. Since my first dive, I’ve been writting them  down in a paper dive log. Every diver is doing so. Last summer, I was wondering what it could look like if it was a digital dive log.

Basically, I wanted an online place to put my personal dives.

Of course, if we put together all these dives of the many divers around the world, it could lead to a large amount of data about diving spots. (what can be seen at a particular location, what diving center to contact, difficulty of the dive…) And thus be a huge knowledge base.

Moreover, I want to stay in touch with other divers I met, I want to explore where they have been diving in the world, I want to connect with diving centers before my trip. It will thus have social functions. A social networks of divers, of sea lovers.

Done 100 times

Of course, I was sure this had been done by others. I started looking at existing solutions. My conclusion is simple: there are many online dive logs, but many of them suffer from a bad user experience, and none succeeded in attracting me. They do not merge data to create something larger. There are also many dive spot encyclopedia, and none of them is open data, most of them do not offer a pleasant way to browse spots…

I didn’t find the experience I have in mind. That’s why I will build it.

Let’s do it

My plan is to build something in a 2 weeks timeframe, starting today. I will post regular updates on this blog and more frequent updates on twitter (@sterenlabs).

How can you help ?

If you are a beginner or experienced diver or not at all, I would love to hear what you think about the project in the comments of this post. What would you expect in such a platform? Your ideas and suggestions are welcomed.

If you know and use an existing website that does the same, please let me know.

I’m also still looking for a name. It’s hard because many domain names mixing diving words are already taken (“dive”, “log”, “wiki”, “bubble”) and we tend to forget them because they are not original. I really want something people will remember easily. I like quite well “opendivers“, but I’m not convinced (and the .com is selling at 1200$). I wanted also “globglob” (if you get the reference), but the .com is taken.

Specifications

Here is what will drive my work in the next weeks: