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.
“Just as you can ask a map app to give you all the good vegan restaurants within 10 miles of your location, you could get all the good 5.10s close to your GPS location,” says Nguyen. And thus—yadayada, thousands of hours of work later—OpenBeta was born.
OpenBeta.io is climbing’s first open-source API route database. The site is relatively new and—how to put this delicately?—brimming with potential. Its current iteration reminds me of Tumblr, with a homepage focused on user-submitted photographs of routes. It’s not (yet) in a place where you can easily browse, search for, and discover routes that will inform your next trip. Descriptions are missing, the map-view feature is a little slow and buggy, and crag and route counts are incomplete. There is much more work ahead.
And that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this article: to draw the community’s attention to helping Nguyen and his team build OpenBeta. I think developing a robust, accurate, and complete guide database with an open-source API is some of the most important work this community could put its seemingly boundless energy toward. The consequences of getting this right—of building an accurate, updated open-source database of routes and boulders across the country—cannot be overstated.
There are many ways this can all go wrong, too. A ground-up conversation about how to structure information in a way that’s not just useful and accurate but also captures the culture and preserves history is very much needed. I find this exciting!
Putting OpenBeta’s surface interface aside for the moment, it’s important to understand that it’s the underlying database infrastructure that holds the real goods. This is where the real opportunity lies for climbers to create new and better kinds of climbing experiences through apps. Once this API is up and running, the sky’s the limit.
So I don’t bury the lede, here are three immediate calls to action:
1. OpenBeta is now Open
As of last month, the OpenBeta database is open to anyone. You can add route contributions and make edits to existing climbs, Wikipedia-style. After creating an account, check out the Test Area to understand how this interface works.
Share climbing photos, add new routes, or write a guest article for their blog. Contribute code, fix bugs, suggest features, give feedback, or just contribute financially to support the project. OpenBeta is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit collective and every dollar they get helps them keep the lights/servers on and continue their mission.
2. OpenBeta needs web developers, technical writers, designers, and more
Here’s an article for how to get involved at OpenBeta. And if you’re a developer, here’s the OpenBeta Github. The coders who climb (or climbers who code) working on this project are all donating their spare time, and they could use help!
3. OpenBeta wants to work with route developers, too
The other kind of developers! Route developers and guidebook authors are the de facto authorities and gatekeepers of route information in the climbing world. Their contributions are essential to making OpenBeta as accurate and useful as possible. Check out their Discord or email them at info@openbeta.io to begin contributing.
OK … so why do open source climbing guides matter?
The simple answer to this question is there are really imaginative, useful, and exciting apps that will one day be built on the back of this kind of API. For example, it may lead to an app that could tell you if it’s raining on your project at that very moment. Or someone could create a social network around the idea of connecting partners looking to team up for the same project / objective (swipe right on the guy with the daisy chain on his harness!). Or, for fuck’s sake, just a better 8a.nu! A better Mountain Project. And better digital guidebooks.
You won’t be surprised to learn that this kind of disruptive ideation is the target of vested interests and status-quo thinking that views OpenBeta as a hostile threat to be destroyed. Mountain Project’s owners, OnX, for example, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Open Beta two years ago because Nguyen originally mined the Mountain Project database of user-generated content to kick off his idea. Like many climbers, this micro scandal is originally how I learned about OpenBeta. Once I dug in and understood their vision, I have been a curious and keen supporter of their efforts ever since.
The threat of a lawsuit has since gone away—it had no legal standing to begin with—and Nguyen and the dispersed band of coders who climb (or, perhaps, climbers who code) are now able to continue on with their work.
Given that I can just sense the resistance many guidebook authors and publishers will understandably feel about wanting to work with OpenBeta, let me take a swipe at offering a justification for why they should.
First, it’s happening regardless, and the printed guidebook market will only continue to be disrupted by technology. People like me will buy print versions of guidebooks because I like having them on my shelf, but the days of hauling three pounds of paper to crags is over. Guidebooks have already been replaced to some degree by digital apps like Mountain Project, but these apps aren’t always great. No one likes squinting at the phone photo they took of the printed topo on page 223 while they’re on a multi pitch.
The guidebook publishers who see this API as an opportunity to build their own proprietary apps will be more successful than those who continue to try to pay the bills by scraping by on the margins of expensive, heavy-stock, perfect-bound books printed in Taiwan.
I have some concerns about how all of this information gets collected and edited—which is one reason why bringing in authoritative sources like guidebook authors will be so important. How can we best align the incentives for guide creators to contribute to an open-source route database? If someone has a good idea here, let’s hear it.
On an altruistic level, it’s just the right thing to do. The question of who has the “right” to publish a guidebook, is a thorny age-old question in our sport. And it’s one I also find absurd if you begin with the premise that our routes, boulders, and crags belong to the community.
But just because those routes “belong” in some sense to all of us, there still needs to be authorities—guidebook authors who have a deep connection to an area; who are deeply versed in its history, culture and traditions; and who can act as bulwarks against grade inflations, violations of local ethics, and silly demands for route name changes (not all of these demands are silly, but many are)—need to be part of this process.
I’m hardly a techno-optimist, but I see the potential to create something useful and cool here. But only if it’s done right.
Please continue the discussion in the comments. I’m hoping to speak with Nguyen on The RunOut podcast at some point, so if you have any questions for him, please include them below. I’d also be interested in hearing from app developers their ideas for how this kind of open-source API could be used to improve our climbing experience.
It may well be the future of guidebooks, but how we get there matters.
After reading your article, I created an account and browsed my local area. I immediately noticed this area populated with content that I wrote, word-for-word, apparently scrubbed from Mountain Project. I’m not talking about route names and grades, but my creative blow-by-blow route descriptions, area descriptions…heck, even the entire organization of the subareas was pulled from MP.
So while I may agree…eventually…with open sourcing my route descriptions, having my creating content lifted from MP without my consent isn’t cool.
Bad first move, Open Beta!
Hi Jim,
As per our email conversation, thank you for providing me the list of climbs & crags. I will edit out all texts by EOD Monday 2/13. Thank you for your patience.
Viet Nguyen
Thanks Andrew for giving OpenBeta some love. I sure hope it catches on and becomes the new standard for sharing route info! I personally stopped contributing new route information to Mountain Project a couple years when they threatened OpenBeta.
When you contribute to MP, you grant MP a right to use your content, while you, the contributor, continue to hold the copyright. When somebody, or in this case an organization, copies your content from MP, it is no different than if they copied it from your book. MP is the publisher, just as Falcon or Wolverine is a publisher.
I see the merits in crowd-sourced guidebook content, and I think Open Beta could be cool. But I don’t think Open Beta should be bootstrapping their business by scrubbing copyrighted content, in some cases MY content, from MP. That should be my choice!
I think it is entirely appropriate for MP to go after Open Beta for this behavior.
I can’t express how much I disagree. Like Jim Lawyer, for years I’ve had writing lifted directly from my guides and pasted on MP and elsewhere. But after decades of ripping off guide authors, MP still sucks – as does Open Beta – based on your description. If MP or Open Beta had the decency to pay for content that would be different, like Gunks Guides did with us in collaborating on a digital version of my City of Rocks guide. Information has value, just like your rope and gear. You get what you pay for.
By your logic does it mean you should pay first ascentionists so you can include their routes in your guidebooks? I’ve yet to have that happen and have had routes I posted on MP end up in guidebooks and the author never asked my for consent or offered to pay me.
> have had routes I posted on MP end up in guidebooks and the author never asked my for consent or offered to pay me.
That’s just wrong, and totally the fault of the author. In this case, I would argue that such an author is as wrong as Open Beta in this case.
Yeah, point taken. Just me being a blowhard!
When I notice my copyrighted content on MP, I alert an admin and it is immediately removed. Often they remove the offending account. Just an off-topic aside.
Thanks Andrew! This is a timely and spot on article – progress will happen! We have been struggling to find out information about thousands of routes developed in Yosemite National Park – incredibly the info is being hoarded by guidebook authors even to the dismay of many of the first ascentionists!
I would be happy to see the routes I documented preserved in a true, open-source app owned by climbers! ….the old, ‘it will take business away from the deserving few’ is simply untrue – new car companies pop up all the time even though the market is saturated many times beyond the number of people on Earth.
Maybe a good place to start would be to focus on routes on public lands? No doubt the work load for developers will be incredible – maybe a group like the Access Fun, AAC or AAJ could spearhead the sponsorship?
> …incredibly the info is being hoarded by guidebook authors even to the dismay of many of the first ascentionists!
Well, that’s just wrong too. I encourage anyone submitting their routes to me to also place them on MP. And even if they don’t, I also place them on a website for everyone to see until I can get a new edition out.
There is obvious value in professionally-edited, curated guidebook content. I would like to see Open Beta or MP or whatever bridge the gap between a route database and an actual “guidebook”.
Jim Lawyer nailed it, can’t add much.
My guides are the only funding for trail work, bolt replacement and trash cleanup at our local crags.
I already find each guide update shared pretty much verbatim to MP, so three cheers for giving what remained of that funding away “for the good of the community”.
Gotta love activists… Always ready to spend your last dime for their good cause.
I think video is a good analogy for open-source products: It’s really entertaining and eventually somewhat informative to watch many hours of raw, open-source video. You can earn a lot if you have the patience, but in a lowest-common-denominator sort of way. A professionally edited film is something else entirely. Guidebooks are maybe not so highfalutin’, but OMG it’s ridiculous how many hundreds of editing hours go into good guidebooks. It’s embarrassing, actually. Plus, you have a real author and publisher to bitch at, or converse with, if you have an intelligent thought or concern – and they might actually care WTF you have to say. Alternatively, you can wander around the crag staring at your phone, lost, like so many poor souls do, every beautiful, sunny climbing day at crags across America. But I’m sure, soon, a crowd-sourced climbing social media platform will fix it all up WAY better. It worked for everything else, right?!
Interesting idea. I’ve written three guides and I’m generally supportive of open source outlets. I think they serve a different role than paid info, so they’re mutually reinforcing. I hear what Jim Lawyer is saying above, and I don’t exactly disagree. At the same time, reproducing my words isn’t something I care too much about myself. I write info so people can have it, after all. Still, I am concerned about Openbeta using people’s words without giving credit to the creators (be they published authors or MP users). Is this common practice at Openbeta? If they’re using MP info, it’s bound to be an issue. To give credit is to say they violate someone’s copyright. To not give credit is to take someone’s work without attribution. I want to like openbeta, so I’m curious to hear more.
I’ll add that I don’t have a particular love of MP. I’ve used it over the years many times, but always as a last resort. They closed their data to research years ago, so academics like me would love an alternative.
Making climbing data accessible and available to research is exactly why OpenBeta exists!
The data published on OpenBeta.io came from a dataset originally created for data science & machine learning tutorials hence no personal identifiable information. If you email us (data at openbeta dot io) a list of climb pages you originally created, I’ll look into ways to add attribution.
Pages on OB are editable by everyone (we keep a history) so over time the content may/will evolve and be different than the original version. I studied how OpenStreetMap (the largest crowd-sourcing mapping community) handles attribution and learned that while they keep a history of authors, they don’t require downstream users to credit every individual contributors. It’s just not practical and creates an administrative burden. Instead you just say “(c) OpenStreetMap contributors”. I’m brainstorming with other volunteers to figure out a sensible solution. Your input is important. I’d love to have you in the discussion.
Thank you Andrew for giving us a space to discuss this important issue. And I appreciate all the feedback. I’m planning to meet with other OB volunteers in the upcoming weeks to discuss a sensible path going forward, addressing some of the issues brought up here. We’d love to have more folks involved.
Opinions expressed here are my own. They do not express the views of OpenBeta volunteers.
I think this discussion is not about OpenBeta; it’s about how the climbing community can support route developers, guidebook authors, and at the same time be open to new and innovative uses of climbing data, whether they’re for profit or for a school and research project.
OpenBeta is publishing the information in the public interest. Our small group of dedicated volunteers have zero financial gains nor do we “own” any of the data and source code. In fact you can take the source code and launch a competing project tomorrow. The data published on OB can be improved upon and published on other platforms, whether it’s online or in guidebooks, which can help fund trash cleanups or other initiatives.
For example, one of our upcoming initiatives is to clean up the FA data, so that climbs can be properly cataloged and the data can be of better use to the whole community. If you’re a route developer or FA I’d love to hear your input.
I agree that open source Topo information will become the standard one way or another. In regards to the funding issue (bolts, trails, clean-ups etc.) which I do find is one of many good argument for a printed Topo: I know for certain I would have used a donate button for particularly good climbing experiences I had on the vision/work/money of some route developers. Or when finding that the anchor on a dear classic needs to be replaced. I know, a 3rd of a bolt might sound ridiculous but I would expect the amount sourced this way to exceed what guidebooks sells can contribute pretty quickly. Something similar to patreon might also work. I feel it is hard to not see the potential here.
I can only speak from the perspective of the UK but, in my view, your article is trying to solve a problem that doesn’t need to exist. Here in the UK we have freely accessible routes database of 593,602 routes on 2,538 crags, as of today. UKClimbing Logbooks isn’t opensource but anyone can contribute and we make no claim on the copyright of the information. It is available for all climbers and guidebook writers to read, edit and contribute to. In addition Rockfax (same company) publish some of the best print guidebooks around with properly paid authors and a great app that has paid subscription system that funds its future development. We are an Employee Owned Business with no third party investors.
I agree that having a two-way, open data system with regard to climbing information is an essential foundation to base your print and digital publications on, but there is a huge gap from a user-sustained free database of routes to a sustainable high quality guidebook information in print and digital. For this to work it can only be done on a professional basis – you need full-time paid people to author the guides and develop the apps. This may be the intention OpenBeta but there is an unnecessary confrontation tone to your article about altruism verses profit making businesses.
More worrying are the cases where people’s written information is being used uncredited as seen in some of the comments. I maintain a huge database of routes so I am aware that information can creep in innocently when users submit guidebook descriptions verbatim, from books they had nothing to do with, thinking they are providing a service. We have some protection against this now. I may be behind the discussion here but my limited understanding of the Mountain Project data case is that the method by which the data was obtained by OpenBeta makes me think there must be many cases where people’s submissions to MP are being used uncredited without their knowledge . For the sake of OpenBeta’s credibility, I would urge that some system is put in place in order to establish this ‘permission’ in order to maintain the credibility of the data.
Alan James
Director of UKClimbing Limited, the employee-owned company behind UKClimbing.com, UKHillwalking,com, Rockfax print and Rockfax Digital
I’m glad to see UKC joining the discussion.
> UKClimbing Logbooks isn’t opensource but anyone can contribute and we make no claim on the copyright of the information. It is available for all climbers and guidebook writers to read, edit and contribute to.
Please correct me if I’m wrong. The information flow you describe is only in one direction – information flowing *in* UKC. Can it be taken out?
Since the community is not getting paid for the labour which benefit UKC, can you confirm whether or not any of the following use cases is possible?
– Can someone take crag GPS coordinates and add them to other open-platforms such as OpenStreetMap?
– Can a guidebook author take crag and route information as a baseline for the next guidebook?
– Can a uni student extract some data for an academic research project?
– Can a coding student or a software developer use data to build a rock climbing app? whether it’s for free or for profit?
> Since the community is not getting paid for the labour which benefit UKC, can you confirm whether or not any of the following use cases is possible?
> Can someone take crag GPS coordinates and add them to other open-platforms such as OpenStreetMap?
I am sure this happens and is done by third party users.
– Can a guidebook author take crag and route information as a baseline for the next guidebook?
As long as they don’t verbatim copy route descriptions then all the information is available to all and is regularly used by guidebook writers other than Rockfax.
– Can a uni student extract some data for an academic research project?
This regularly happens although we do request people contact us first so that we can check what they are doing. We have given permission to numerous student surveys over the years.
– Can a coding student or a software developer use data to build a rock climbing app? whether it’s for free or for profit?
They can create an app but they can’t populate it with our data.
To me this is a two-way process. It may not be as open as you would want it to be but I have made my points above about why quality well-maintained data is preferable and needs some limits to sustain it.
Hi Alan, all of my work was copied without permission. All of my area hard worked area organization also. Unacceptable.
> Hi Alan, all of my work was copied without permission. All of my area hard worked area organization also. Unacceptable.
If you email me I can look into this. As I mentioned above, users do submit verbatim information and it is difficult to keep track when dealing with so much data so there are certainly examples that can be found. We have put in some checks to this now so it is unlikely to happen again but anyone who runs a publicly accessible database will know that you can’t control everything that goes in without severely limiting the accessibility.
I think what’s missing from this article is the value proposition against the incumbents like Mountain Project. MP is already basically a user driven wiki-style website. So from most users perspective, I suspect it already qualifies as “open”.
Love it or not, MP has a lot of mind share. I think that makes it hard to displace. It seems to me there are a few areas for innovation
– API access. A commenter above alluded to MP shutting this off. Only the geeks will care about this. Ordinary users may love the features that can be built on top of an API, but I don’t think that’s a direct enough motivation to change which website they contribute to by default.
– Honoring historic but potentially offensive route names. This will have a market, just like gab.com does, but it will likely be small.
– Being a non-profit. This is potentially a selling point to a lot climbers. Then again, the NFL was a non-profit for a long time too.
– It resolves problems I’m unaware of with how MP stewards its data.
So more or less, I’m kind of left thinking “so what”? Most of the value I can see in this would be driven from some kind of ideological mindset. If I’m right about that, then I would predict openbeta will keep playing second fiddle to MP, just like Linux does to Windows and macOS and OpenStreetMaps does to google maps. I’m not trying to sound like a dick, but I don’t understand how this is sufficiently different from MP that I should be excited.
We get into this topic in an upcoming episode of The RunOut, in a conversation with Viet. I agree most users won’t understand why they should be contributing to OpenBeta rather than mountain project, but that’s the point of this article. And stay tuned for our forthcoming podcast, which delves into this more.
Well… I really don’t have any cachet when it comes to this topic other than having contributed a small to moderate amount of route info to MP, and having been a user since 2003. (wow… where did the time go?). That said, I am cognizant of the fact that my “small to moderate” morphs into “vanishingly small” when yardsticked against guidebook authors Herculean efforts.
That said, it seems to my admittedly jaundiced eye that MP hasn’t seen many, if any, “improvements” since the days of stone tablets. (If stone tablets were good enough for my parents, then by god…!). Neither REI, when they purchased it from Mr. Wilder, nor OnX, as far as I have been able to discern, have invested any real resources into upgrading the user experience. I’ve contacted them on more than one occasion to suggest areas that I felt were ripe for improvement, but was told that – those things have all been discussed for years, now, but…. Or words to that effect. That left me wishing for viable alternatives.
After listening to the interview / discussion with Viet, he seems like a good guy and I get where he’s coming from – a viewpoint and approach to climbing info that makes sense for a code writer who sees the world in numbers. Personally, I prefer beta to data and want more than just the stats about routes. Jeep stirring the pot!
There are no meaningful laws that protect guidebook authors from plagiarism—all the plagiarist need do is change a few words here and there, and swish, they can produce their own guidebook, or open source, with a fraction of the effort that the original author put in. I’ve dumbly spent the last 40 years of my life cleaning the worst imaginable choss and turning it into rock climbing. In my guidebooks I’ve placed or replaced well over 50% of the bolts in the book and also discovered and cleaned a similar percentage of the chossy boulders in the area. I’ve spent years developing now popular areas that people previously wrote off as too chossy. Did I spend the majority of my time and money developing the routes? Yes. Did I hoard the names and locations of the routes I created? Yes. Did I hope to cash in (aka break even) on said hoarding? Absolutely Did someone copy them all to MP the day my guidebook became available? Also yes. Am I a sucker? For sure. Am I going to find another way to fund all the effort I put in to establishing and rebolting routes? Probably not.
I’m hoping the future of open source doesn’t involve copying all of my structure and content from MP directly into Open Beta with a) no credit to me b) no consent from me. At least MP gives me kudos and swag for my contributions. I consider this copying without consent to be intellectual plagiarism.