Our Vision

A COLLABORATIVE PADDLING DATABASE

 Paddle WAPaddle SA

 

 

 

 

 

The Waterways Guide should be the place where paddlers and other water users want to SHARE their latest trips and adventures. This collaborative website will be a one stop shop of information to support the varied needs of paddlers and water users. It should be laid out in such a way that it is easy to find the information that you want, its useful and timely to make trip planning easy, safe and enjoyable.

You can personalise the website by choosing favourite waterways, connecting with friends. receiving live updates of river levels for specific rivers, and logging your trip details for easy reference next time. .  

It will be possible to access and distribute information for free through multiple channels, including the "email a friend" via the website, facebook, PaddleSafe APP for iphones and ipads using the PDF DETAILED INFORMATION tab. As soon as funds are raised an app for Android mobile devices will be developed. 

Because we are committed to provide a free product on the web we welcome donations.  To sustain the website long term we will consider commercial opportunities and partnerships with Tourism, advertising and the sale of resources generated from the website. and mobile APPS.  

 

Content license and sharing

Broadly what we're aiming to do is ensure 4 things:

  1. The content is available to be used by paddlers or other waterways users.
  2. Anyone who contributes content gets proper attribution.
  3. The content can NOT be taken by 3rd parties and sold without our agreement.
  4. We can leverage the content to help pay our server and development costs, so we can continue to not just exist but keep making the site more awesome.

Essentially what our contributor agreement boils down to is:

  • You retain ownership of your own content, including your right to also license your content to anyone else under another license you want (except exclusive ones).
  • Your contributions will be licensed to the world in general, including the Waterways Guide CC-BY-SA.
  • You specifically grant The Waterways Guide the right to use the content commercially to give us an income to cover our hosting and development costs.

Financially viability

We would like The WaterwaysGuide.org.au to become financially viable, or at a minimum, be able to pay its own hosting and infrastructure costs.

We plan to do this through donations and limiting advertising on The Waterways Guide website. We will also explore other revenue opportunities when they come up, such as user pays mobile app.

In order for us to be able to do this, standard users contributing to the Waterways Guide projects are required to grant broad permissions to The WaterwaysGuide.org.au and the general public to re-distribute and re-use your contributions.  Any user may choose to contribute to The Waterways Guide as a publisher under a different arrangement instead of as a standard user, please contact us.

Once we become financially viable we plan to put in place financial initiatives that will directly benefit the paddling community. A percentage of takings will go to initiatives decided on by the paddling community (e.g. new products, clubs, paddling groups, etc). 

Initiatives under development.

Targeting mobile devices

An android app is being developed and will be released soon  

Facebook

Information available through your Facebook page to share information

 

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