Freezing Saddles 2014 Discussion Draft

[rcannon100]

Freezing Saddles 2014 Discussion Draft – okay, we learned a lot last year.

Freezing Saddles is a community driven event generated by the good folk of the BA Bike Forum. It is not run or sponsored by any org. It is the product of many good people doing many good things. It is the ultimate in crowd sourced cycling!

Since this is a crowd sourced game, its time for the crowd to pontificate on how the game will be played. The goal is to come to consensus on this years version.

Lessons learned from last year

* Everyone who signs up must be reachable (dont assume they are watching the forum). I avoided collecting email addresses last year cause I did not want to handle PII. We had a number of people sign up but then never participate. Recommendation: This year we need some way to reach people. If we are able to use STRAVA this year, then everyone who signs up must (a) be a forum member and (b) be on STRAVA.

* This was really a community event of the forum. What made it fun was the banter in the cold of winter as we slogged our way through that 3 feet of snow last year. Recommendation: focus FS on the forum. Dont market it outside the forum. Assume participants are member participants.

* This is a crowd sourced game. We need lots of volunteers to handle all the different aspects of the game.

* This is a crowd sourced game run by volunteers. Please dont make the life of the volunteers more difficult.

* Late sign ups did not really work. The end result was the creation of an 11th team that never really got off the ground. We can just assign late sign ups to an N+1 team if we want – but I have no expectation that that team will be able to compete.

* Last year the handicap was based on November and December riding statistics (how much did you ride on average per week during November and December?). That actually seemed like it worked pretty well. What should this years handicap be based on? September perhaps for those who participated in the Natl Bike Challenge??

* Any other revisions??

Below is from last year:

Freezing Saddles: Winter Bike Challenge
Never Give an ELITE Cyclist an Even Break

NOTE: Excluded activities: If you post an activity to Strava during the competition period which is not an outdoor bike ride, then it should have the string “#NoBAFS” in the activity name.

Freezing Saddles! The Epic Adventure of a band of ELITE Cyclists, facing the challenges of the wild wild wild bike paths. Confronting the darkest of evenings, the coldest of mornings, and the stupidest of Ninjas – these brave cyclists challenge each other because, if they didnt, they might have to actually do some work during the day.

The saga runs January 1 until the last day of Winter, March 20. It will conclude with a March Madness Playoff that someone will probably design. There will be a Happy Hour at the end with many pointless trophies.

Tribes (teams):

• Composed of ~5 riders or less
• For riders from the #bikedc, Washington DC Bike Forum general community (Washington DC greater metropolitan area)
• Volunteer Captains (captains will address any data problems, negotiate or cause confusion, and provide motivational seminars);
• This is a ten-gallon hat tournament. Riders will be randomly assigned to tribes based on self declared average weekly mileage and days cycled. Tribes will be created so that each tribes’s average weekly point score is roughly equal to everyone else’s. To achieve this, tribes may be composed of differing numbers of riders.
• No late sign ups.
• Interested cyclists must sign up by December 25 Midnight – Tribes will be announced within a couple days.

Scoring: Riders will receive 10 points for each day and 1 point for each mile ridden. Minimum ride is 1 mile. The tribe’s score will be the sum of the tribe members (indoor trainers do not count- you must be freezing in the saddle outside).

Backend: STRAVA (please sign up for an account, and join the “Bike Arlington” club on STRAVA – you should be able to enter data manually or automatically. Additional information will be posted here on the forum.)

This is a self organized group activity based on consensus. No one is in charge or running this thing. Participation is voluntary and entirely at your own risk.

Be Brave. Be Bold. Be…. questful! In the words of Hedley Lamarr:

Men, you are about to embark on a great crusade to stamp out runaway decency on the bike paths. Now you men will only be risking your lives, whilst I will be risking an almost certain Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Topic

[GB]

on a mostly unrelated topic:

When you have Strava premium does it show you where your friend/follow(er/ies) are? If so, that plus the heat maps might just get me to pay (although I probably need more friends for it really be worth it

[americancyclo]

@GregBain 69031 wrote:

When you have Strava premium does it show you where your friend/follow(er/ies) are?

What do you mean by that? The real time tracking feature found on phones?

[hozn]

@americancyclo 69032 wrote:

What do you mean by that? The real time tracking feature found on phones?

Yeah, I think their Android app does this (maybe it’s premium only?). I don’t use the app, though, so can’t really comment on that. It does sound marginally useful if you have your phone mounted to your bike. I use Garmin’s live track feature when I am meeting someone somewhere, just in case I’m early/late.

(This isn’t related to freezing saddles, though, so should probably be a new thread?)

[GB]

@hozn 69033 wrote:

so should probably be a new thread?)

Agreed, and done.

[hozn]

@PeteD 69028 wrote:

If Strava’s locked up their API, I’m curious how veloviewer.com is still able to get full information.

–Pete

Yeah, they haven’t locked their API; they’ve restricted it. Veloviewer, raceshape, etc. have access.

It also seems that tapiriik was granted access at some point (after the official no-more-access cutoff date). I requested access originally, specifically referencing freezing saddles & the open-source python Strava library I would like to be able to maintain. (Was not granted.)

Anyway, I have emailed them again; they’re not super quick with responses, but we’ll see if anything new comes of it. I don’t imagine multiple inquiries would hurt, though I think I was able to express the extent of participation in my email, so I’m not sure it would add a lot. It’s not like they’re going to relax the restrictions; the best I could hope for would just be to be given an API key.

(I’ve also emailed RWGPS. I’d probably contribute a patch to tapiriik to add RWGPS support if they do provide an API that supports it.)

P.S. “API” = “Application Programming Interface”. It’s basically making a website (or other application) intelligible to computers — as opposed to humans. So this usually involves dumbing down the data into very rigid structures that can be processed by machine, as opposed to rich & colorful tables that make sense to humans. “Screen scraping” is when there is no API provided, so you make a computer attempt to process the contents of the designed-for-humans web pages to extract the data. This usually works, but is very brittle (since the website designers don’t expect anyone to do this, they will make changes to the code at will that may not change the meaning for their human readers but may break the parsing algorithms of the screen scrapers — e.g. re-arranging columns in a grid.)

[mstone]

@eminva 69024 wrote:

I’m not a technical expert and I don’t even know what “API” stands for, but if I’m on the Strava marketing team, I’d be reading this thread with increasing alarm. They either need to make the “API” available, figure out how to facilitate Freezing Saddles-type events inhouse or lose the franchise to a competitor or upstart.

All of the for-profit data companies end up doing this. They feel that your data is their value proposition, and they aren’t interested in sharing it. If you don’t like that, don’t give your data to a company and let them control access to it. The right answer is open APIs that let you keep your data where you want it, and allow apps & other authorized users to access it on your terms. That will only happen if people insist on it, and most people don’t care that much and will put up with whatever strava/facebook/twitter/etc do.

[eminva]

@mstone 69038 wrote:

All of the for-profit data companies end up doing this. They feel that your data is their value proposition, and they aren’t interested in sharing it. If you don’t like that, don’t give your data to a company and let them control access to it. The right answer is open APIs that let you keep your data where you want it, and allow apps & other authorized users to access it on your terms. That will only happen if people insist on it, and most people don’t care that much and will put up with whatever strava/facebook/twitter/etc do.

My issue isn’t whether I like it or not. It’s just that if their most avid users, including a fair number of their paying “Premium” users have to go elsewhere to get all the functionality they want, they may end up deciding it’s not worth sticking with the original once they get most of what they need elsewhere.

The thing that really got me thinking was vvill’s note that Ridewithgps can do segments. That’s probably the golden goose for Strava; if people can find that elsewhere, they’ve lost what sets them apart.

Liz

[vvill]

@eminva 69041 wrote:

The thing that really got me thinking was vvill’s note that Ridewithgps can do segments. That’s probably the golden goose for Strava; if people can find that elsewhere, they’ve lost what sets them apart.

Segments are only fun if there’s a critical mass of people logging their rides though and I think Strava’s definitely the only place with that (for now).

[mstone]

@eminva 69041 wrote:

My issue isn’t whether I like it or not. It’s just that if their most avid users, including a fair number of their paying “Premium” users have to go elsewhere to get all the functionality they want, they may end up deciding it’s not worth sticking with the original once they get most of what they need elsewhere.

The thing that really got me thinking was vvill’s note that Ridewithgps can do segments. That’s probably the golden goose for Strava; if people can find that elsewhere, they’ve lost what sets them apart.

Strava is like any other social thingy: their entire value is the idea that your friends are there, and so you have to go there too. It’s not about features, it’s about userbase. (Side note: this is why I think high valuations for social companies are nuts–there’s no real good reason why people can’t just go somewhere else, and history suggests that people are fickle.) Given feature parity, there are fewer reasons not to move en masse, but moving still only makes sense if you can convince enough other people to move also. And then the big question is, will the new social thingy give you any more control of and access to your data than the old social thingy? (Looking not just at what they do now, but what you’ve given them permission to do once they’re big enough to go for a money grab.)

[jopamora]

Might want to come up with a new name for the challenge if the Weather Gang is right about their prediction.

[consularrider]

Well, that seems like the same winter weather pattern as the last two years.

[Hancockbs]

@vvill 69044 wrote:

Segments are only fun if there’s a critical mass of people logging their rides though and I think Strava’s definitely the only place with that (for now).

RwGPS has a very strong segment base as well. I load my data to both sites and find fairly equal usage of both, but generally by different people.

[rcannon100]

So…. who has contacted what services? Hozn is signed up to contact RWGps? Any others? I think its an excellent idea (as in someone said it at FCCII this morning). What services can we contact?

* Strava
* Endomondo
* Garmin Connect
* Mapmyrides
* Geodistance.com,
* Bikejournal.com,
* Veloroutes.org
* Others

Seems pretty standard. We can draw up a pretty standard inquiry, send it to the venders, and see who responds.

Any volunteers to draft a standard letter (I can write up something about creating team challenges, but I dont speak open API and doubt I could draft that question correctly).

And then volunteers for different services (particularly if you are a customer and you like that service).

[PeteD]

I’ve reached out through some back channels to see if we can get access to Strava’s API. (Friend of a friend kinda thing). No guarantees.

–Pete

[GB]

Without understand our IT problem at all, I was just wondering if not having teams would remove the problem?

I was on the misfit team last year, so it was really an individual competition for me, which I was perfectly happy with.

[Author]

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