U.S. climbing writers do love a bit of third person to open a story don't they:
''Viet Nguyen sipped his coffee as he scanned the weather outside his window in Madrid. There were no ominous clouds. It had been a bad week and he wanted to climb. Then the email came.''
''Viet Nguyen was wandering around the yawning labyrinth of Indian Creek in 2017 when it dawned on him that what climbing really needed was an open-source API, similar to OpenStreetMap, but for route and crag information.''
Pete was having a lazy Sunday afternoon at home doing a tax return, then he noticed Slacker's post about openbeta...
Thanks Slackline, looks a good idea and I hope it grows into something big. But... the incentive to share data with UKC / MP / 8a etc. is that once data is shared it, almost instantly, becomes useable in a user-friendly format because of work/expense that's been put in to build a user-friendly interface (ukc logbooks and rockfax app, less so 8a.nu but still useful).
Whereas the incentives to share data with openbeta seem a bit less immediate and more long term 'moral' reasons, in the hope the data can be used in a free topo app (?) or the openbeta itself is transformed into a more user-friendly interface (?). People being people, I know which I'd place my money on but hope I'm wrong.
I put all of NW limestone into a free app, this was pre-rockfax app and the first time a whole guidebook was available in app format (Steve Golley the engine behind it). I then failed to advertise it and I think hardly anyone used it. It was pretty good though I think. Maybe you can use Steve's app format (if he's still in the game) with openbeta's data? Steve's apps were easy to do dataentry and topo-build. Could be a pretty juicy combination.
edit: can't actually remember if the NWL app was free or paid. I know I was free though as I took nothing from it!