62 | Mountain Project vs. Open Beta | A Fight For Data Rights w/ Viet Nyguen

The Climbing Majority

Today, we're diving into something that most of us are all familiar with - Mountain Project. It's the guidebook that's always at our fingertips, supported and enriched by our very own community. Yet, as revolutionary as it has been for sharing and discovering climbs, it brings up a few questions that we might easily overlook. Questions like, who actually owns the data we input? What happens to our contributions if we decide to bow out and delete our profile? And what do these practices mean for the future of climbing information? Honestly, these questions can really make you pause and think.
That's exactly why today, we're sitting down with Viet, a climber who's spotted the signs and decided to carve out a new path. He's one of the pioneering brains behind Open Beta IO, an initiative that’s rethinking our approach to how we share climbing data.
Viet’s vision? It's all about creating a space where information is not just shared but is open-sourced and accessible to all. As things stand, the data we openly donate to Mountain Project can't be repurposed or reused by others. To Viet, this lockdown of publicly sourced information is not just ethically gray; it's a blockade to the myriad of possibilities this data could unlock. But challenging the status quo and attempting to alter two-decade-old climber behaviors come with its own set of hurdles, questions to be answered, and ethical dilemmas to navigate.
So, get comfy and join us as we dive deep with Viet into the essence of Open Beta, the motivations driving it, and its potential to redefine how we, as climbers, connect with each other and the crags we cherish. At the very least, it's a chance for us to reflect on our complacency with surrendering our data, contributions, and creative outputs without much thought on how the way this data is being managed might actually be holding our community back.
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IG: @the.climbing.majority
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Resources:
Openbeta.io