Kitegories: kite knowledge tool (starting phase)

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[Ara Ararauna]

Hi!

Imagine a tool where:
- Newbies can see which kites are the best starter kites as rated by all the community
- Half experienced pilots can check which could be their trainer kite
- Team fans could see which kites are preferred most by other teams
- Tricksters could see which kites best do spin tricks or roll tricks
- Anyone can compare ULs according to the community experience and even compare between the preferences in Noth America, Europe, Down Under, South America, etc.
- ...

I was thinking we could try to do that through a Google Drive Form/Surveys tool. It would allow each person to answer a survey like set of questions on each existing kite. Then the answers would be displayed in different rating graphs to allow anyone to see the results of the knowledge of the kite community worldwide.

I was thinking the steps to be taken in doing this:
1. Think which categories (kitegories) would be interesting to attach to each kite
2. Define the most complete list of kites and in a way it can be expanded easily
3. Define the survey for everyone to fill
4. Define the different ways that information can be displayed to allow for different queries and points of view

So, I started defining the kitegories and I though of the following:
+ Starter: how good a starter a kite is; i.e. starting to fly, basic controls, turning, circling, basic landing
+ Trainer: how good is a kite to start going further from Starter; i.e. elementary tricks to start going into better control
+ Precision:
+ Spin Tricks:
+ Roll Tricks:
+ Cost-Performance Ratio
These would be rated from 1 to 5 (or do you think it would be better to have 1 to 10?)

We would then have tags identifying the type of kite:
+ STD
+ UL
+ SUL
+ VTD
+ Indoors
To be able to define whether the kite is really in that type irrespective of what the manufacturer says. So these would be only Yes/No.

DO you think such tool would be useful?
Do you think we could get the community to really participate?
Are you willing to do so?

Do you have any new kitegories to be added that you think would really be useful?
Do you have any other suggestions?

Well, I have thrown my idea to the community.
I now would like to hear from you. 
Cheers,

N.


P.S: I really didn't know where to post this... so I decided to place it here. But if anyone thinks it should go somewhere else please tell me and I'll swap it or duplicate it.

[thief]

that is a good idea...one hell of an undertaking!!!

i think that you would get a bunch of people to help out fill it in, but then getting people to use it as a beginning reference tool might be a little harder.

Would you want included every sport kite ever in there to be as complete as possible?

[Ara Ararauna]

Thanks Thief.

Well it is a big task but we can start small and grow up from there. My proposal is ambitious but we'll start little by little.

Now concerning the kites, I would start from those that are current and work back from there once we have rated these first.

N.

[Ara Ararauna]

Hmmmm....

Apparently this is not catching much interest...

I should perhaps forget about the idea...

Well, if I see this catches up I will retake the topic, otherwise I will let it smoothly go to sleep.

N.

[thief]

i would say start building it....classic thing....get it going and it will catch up attention.....

[tpatter]

I think its a interesting idea, but one potential problem is that folks would highly rate their current favorite/newest/darling kite of the day.  Although, I think there would still be value.

In my field, we use wiki's in order to build a repository of useful information for most any topic.  I think this sort of format would be very useful to provide most everything needed.   It's very easy to use and add content with the strength that the content is provided by the users so you do not need to really manage it at all.

You could have a page per kite with standard sub-sections for elements such as bridles, tuning tips, links to reviews, etc.  I would recommend having it under a created google account or similar so that it can outlive one person's whims, or perhaps even hosted by a known entity.  The issue is that I think people would be less willing to invest their time to provide information if it could disappear once the owner moves to some other hobby.

I'm not sure how realistic it is to provide this in a completely public way - it would be like Wikipedia (perhaps we could just use that actually).   Anyhow, thats my suggestion - to keep it open, accessible, and less centrally managed.


Tom

[Ara Ararauna]

Hmmmm... thanks Tom but I think I didn't quite explain myself.
Perhaps this is why people have not reacted to my proposal.

Let me try to explain it better.

This is not meant to be a Kitewikipedia. This could be interesting or useful but my goal is not to record ALL the properties and characteristics of ALL kites.

My goal is rather focussed on the statistics that could be taken from the ratings that people would give to each kite.

Indeed people would rate high their dearest and most recent kite BUT:

1. This should be somewhat tempered or modulated by the ratings of others if sufficient people rate the kites
2. This would also be modulated over time because the idea would be that people could correct their ratings as time goes by

So this should be a living creature that evolves and this should make it useful in that it would reflect the preferences accumulated over time.

This is why I think that the Google Drive Forms/Surveys could be the right tool. So that we could extract the statistics from the ratings such as: "which kites have the highest rating regarding their spin tricks".

I don't know whether I have explained it better this time.
Do you see the difference now?
Cheers,

N.

[Allen Carter]

How would this be more useful than searching the forum and asking questions? Certainly you could look at a bunch of data quickly but data rarely provides good advice. Reading what people have to say about a specific kite is much more useful. The fact that there are always contrary opinions is just the nature of the beast. Kite flying is generally subjective and tends to resist data driven analysis.

[Ara Ararauna]

Hmmmm...

You have a point there...
I thought that sometimes the same questions are being asked over and over again. But then again, this is a way of being in touch with other people and socialising is not only good to get information but also to get the feeling from other people and their warmth (like I have been very often helped in this forum) 

Te data driven analysis could also be a way of people understanding social trends but you are probably right.
My computer engineering background and my empirical research methods have betrayed me and I was starting to mix work with pleasure which one should never do. 

Darn Allen, such a short post on your side and such a strong impact! 

So, this was the short life of the kitegories project. 

Now, you must acknowledge it was indeed a nice name for the project...      

N.