Those reading my twitter stream will see sport plays an integral part of my lifestyle. Hill walking, skiing and not forgetting swimming. Swimming is my no. 1 sport and with my Quantified Self recordings, its has been the place I have focused the beginings of my open sport project endeavours, the open sourcing of sport. It started with a Drupal module to enter swimming training times and those recorded at competitions. But this failed to capture efficiently they training data so I have been working on a real time network application to address this issue, TrainTimer is on Github.
Open sourcing sport is something that has been brewing in me for a while. Just like open source software, open sourcing sport brings transparency and the opportunity for all to participate in evolving the applications etc. The key ingredients is to provide a range of tools that enable individuals to capture their sporting data and share it real time anywhere they choose, on their privacy terms. As a data junkie, it is the opportunity to apply data ‘science’ or ‘data’ analysis and discovery to those willing to share and combine their sporting data that makes things exciting.
I enjoy watch sport on the TV from time to time, especially the World and Olympic swimming but there are so many amateur or masters competitions going on all the time too and I am sure provide just as much excitement and sporting endeavour. This project aims to provide the same range of technology tools to these sporting events. As an individual sporting data becomes increasingly and more frequently under scrutiny with dope testing etc. Hopefully, this open sourcing of sporting data will give the individual the ability to transparently show all when need their sporting story. I think it will be this transparency in competition that will provide the ‘test’ of comparison in the future.
Sport brings much fun to my life and hopefully some of the tools we can build in this project will being additional opportunities for fun to flourish too.