About Us
inyourfootsteps.com uses a ‘question and answer format’ to transfer information quickly and efficiently. We are delighted to use the same approach to let you know about us.
What’s this thing all about?
inyourfootsteps.com is a web application that is also optimised for mobiles devices via Lite.inyourfootsteps.com or liyfs.com for short. The objective of the inyourfootsteps.com project is to share individual sailing experience so that collective wealth of insight may be freely and permanently available to all.
The web application categorises sailing insight and know-how into three categories experience, routes and harbours. It then shares the information in a structured, straight-forward and to-the-point manner. Thereby it creates a unique and rich resource of boatmen, by boatmen, for boatmen.
I mean what does it do for people?
It is about getting stuff done on boats and getting out sailing. It does this by providing a mechanism for the sailing community to share the knowledge and experience required to get out on the water safely in a vastly expanded area of sailing opportunity.
It also offers experienced, problem-solving and pragmatic boatmen a unique opportunity to let their skills and knowledge shine worldwide. Enabling them to give back to the community that they have drawn upon over the years.
So how did this all come about?
In the late nineties Michael Harpur decided that a unique and interesting adventure would be to sail a yacht around the world. Having never sailed a yacht before he immediately found boating nomenclature an obstacle to comprehending the required handling, procedures and practices. To overcome this obstacle he started to write in plain English the key practices and handling procedures that came up. This process continued throughout his circumnavigation extending to include innovations and ideas.
A decade later Michael was working in the IT industry when the birth of his first son Robert brought about a home move. During a disciplined garage clear-out the circumnavigation note books resurfaced. At that moment the rule was; either an item had a definite purpose in the new home, or it did not make the move. Hesitantly, the note books were discarded. This stayed in his mind afterwards as a wasteful mistake until three months later where that thought connected and fused with the present.
Whilst making hand and foot imprints with a then eighteen month old Robert the two were looking at the results. With Robert on his knee the thought seized upon him ‘I may not have a use for that material, but what about those following in my footsteps? But how can it be passed on?’ Reaching for a pen Michael wrote ‘what about those who follow in your footsteps’’ beneath the two small red ink footprints and started to think about it. inyourfootsteps.com was born.
Where is this coming from?
The project inspiration came entirely from a father-to-son moment that became the project trademark and hallmark. Conceived in that moment of care and possibility, it directed and shaped the entire nature of the project.
The site grew to bring together state-of-the-art technical vision with a belief in the power of what we can do together for the common good. This blend of soul, technological innovation and idealism has come to represent the entire project.
So how does it make money?
This important question requires a moment’s reflection before it may be appropriately addressed. Implicit in the question is a natural tendency to define success exclusively upon income generated. Although financial returns are a good thing that endow a project with scalability and sustainability they are not by any means everything.
inyourfootsteps.com is very much rooted in another place that could best be described as humanity. Definition of success will be how we can change the world less by reaching into people’s pockets and more by reaching into their lives and taking that insight beyond them via technical innovation.
Financially, like a child, inyourfootsteps.com does not earn money. Like a child, making money is not its purpose; rather it is to share experience for free. Why have children if they do not earn money? Well, because it fills us with the beauty that is humanity, and powers inyourfootstep.com
So what! It is just another web site, what difference does it make?
Getting together for the common good can have enormous impact and secondary effects. Let’s look at the single focus upon the ‘Harbours’ of Ireland to illustrate the power of inyourfootsteps.com concept on two levels, safety and economic impact.
Half of Ireland is currently been by local boatmen and available on inyourfootsteps.com. It is progressing to the point of making the statement ‘no man need sail off the coast of Ireland for the want of shelter and the local insight to come safely in’. That is a strong statement plus a very important one, not alone for foreign boats, but also local boatmen.
Current and widely used Nautical Almanacs are characterised by brevity and a narrowness of focus. This creates a tendency to focus on main harbours and marinas and little else. Take Wexford, the first county to be addressed by inyourfootsteps.com where the Almanacs focus on one harbour and one marina for the county. This narrows the options down dramatically and as is often the case, the locations covered in Wexford are very dangerous locations to address in heavy weather sailing conditions when people are tired frightened and not as objective. inyourfootsteps.com offers two dozen locations many infinitely safer to address in heavy weather conditions. In 2008 the Irish RNLI performed 19 rescues per week, via 863 launches, 335 in darkness. How much of this can we reduce by providing better information for better decisions?
Likewise ‘That no man need sail off the cost of Ireland for want of shelter’ is also a very ‘welcoming’ statement. In Gaelic the word is ‘Fáilte’ and that welcome is important as visiting boats bring revenue and employment to the economy.
A 2005 economic impact research for Kilmore Quay marina estimate a spend of €167 per visit. Add secondary or shore based effects to this and the impact is estimated to be €257 per visit amounting to a total of €183,700 p.a. This is highly significant in a small rural community. There is a broad understanding that Ireland is not fully exploiting its marine leisure potential and the way to do so is to invest in added marina capacity to receive visiting boats. Marinas are big infrastructure investment pieces, taking time, planning, and investment of tens of millions. None of which is available since the recession has impacted the public purse.
Perhaps the solution is, literally, available by thinking outside of the box, or outside the marina as the case is here. The narrowness of focus upon harbours and marinas may again be often down to the standard Nautical Almanac tendency to focus on main harbours and marinas and little else. This pushes boatmen to appraise a cruising area by Almanacs limited view. Take county Wexford for example once again. If a boatman buys any standard weighty Nautical Almanac it presents; one Marina, one town harbour. In short, a good weather stop-off corner at best.
inyourfootsteps.com by comparison has more than twenty five locations. The material is freely available to one and all to browse through at leisure. It is a rich experience full of colour photos and local history to inspire a visit. Appraised this way any boatman could stumble upon the information on the web and immerse themselves in an appealing virtual cruise. Plus the breadth of coverage makes County Wexford a destination for a three weeks cruise where a vessel could stay in a different and interesting location each night.
Take this single County example to the wider national context and Ireland’s 5,600 kilometres of beautiful coastline plus hundreds of lakes and rivers. Imagine if we pointed potential visiting boatmen at the opportunities along that entire coastline, the available resources, with guides, photos and ‘why visit here’ articles that are available to all. Then the marina picture becomes entirely different as the coast itself is the resource; clearly articulated, at no cost to the country. Indeed available capacity should be freed up by local boatmen find their countries visiting opportunities vastly expanded. This is what inyourfootsteps.com does.
With 1.5 million boats in the UK, potentially within a day sail away, and 750,000 French boats not much further, that’s an important difference that drives a different economic outcome. So as we can see a little sharing in this single example of what inyourfootsteps.com does can make a big difference to individual safety and national economics.
But the information could be rubbish, there is no validity guarantee!
At first glance you could think that as inyourfootsteps provides no content guarantees, represents the aggregate of local individuals and is not from a branded publishing house. Yet we believe the converse to be true; we expect our material to set a new benchmark for quality and accuracy. This is due to the inyourfootsteps.com highly mature ‘people centric’ approach married with good process and technical practices.
The site represents the sailing community as a whole and this group is inherently geared to deliver reliable, accurate information. Unlike many other community interest groups bad information in sailing could quickly result in damaged vessels, injuries or even worse. The inherent standards and care taken in the sailing community is amongst the highest in the world. Taken down to an individual level the harbours and routes contribution process illustrates quality at every step starting with a peer-review meritocracy.
All contributors are exclusively found by the most experienced people in the community who recommend the best for other given areas based on personal experience. Those who have lived and sailed the location know it better than anyone else e.g. for an extreme example what does the Drogheda Harbour Pilot not know about his area after three decades of safely taking ships in and out of the River Boyne? Furthermore, and unlike general publishing house’s desk based writer, contributors to inyourfootsteps.com are more motivated to get the detail correct.
First of all they have focus. Unlike a publishing house editor each contributor has but a few short entries to correctly represent and the small painstaking details are easily adhered to. Plus their personal credibility is at stake here. There is a recognition within the community that comes from contributing that also has a natural flip side. All write ups will be seen and judged by community peers and as such contributors will want the data to be absolutely correct, safe, useful and beyond reproach. Hence write-ups are inherently self regulated.
Finally, the contributors are doing it for the love of sailing, helping their sailing community, or pride in their area. As such they are operating to a higher set of motives than money can buy. Consequently contributors content quality is second to none. Then we add the inyourfootsteps.com processes and technology to make it better.
The contributor content is built out by professional writers with additional research material. When data is input the site’s technology is built from the ground up to prevent natural human error that books do not have. All key GPS positions immediately plot on ‘Google’ maps so they are visually seen to be correct by both writer and end user. Plus the site engages its deeply pragmatic and problem-solving users as content managers.
inyourfootsteps.com makes it very easy for users to flag or recommend relevant data corrections or publicly comment on any piece of data with a few clicks. So the content may be self-sifted by the users and acted upon with immediacy centrally. Plus users get something tangible out of it: better and deeper information, for better safer sailing and a sense of satisfaction and ownership from involvement.
It is this total recipe, of peer-to-peer networking contributor selection, inherent technology safety checks plus user review, with many people looking for problems plus offering update, that provides inyourfootsteps.com with a rapid data feedback for high quality and improvements. This inyourfootsteps.com method does not match what it is currently available; it redefines and sets a new benchmark for data quality.
But surely this type of information is already out there, it has been done before?
Fortunately, the people who travel on the sea tend to be literate souls who often write books, and you are correct there's an astonishingly wide collection of publications available out there. These broadly fall into four categories:
1. Technical books that show you how to tie knots, fix an alternator, adjust a compass, bake a cod fish, or make sense out of a radar screen.
2. Cruising guides, usually with maps and sketches, that tell about Channel Islands or the West coast of Ireland or where to anchor in the Turks and Caicos Islands.
3. Accounts of voyages. Hundreds of books that recollect the joys, triumphs, heartaches, crew fights, break up’s and disasters of small boat sailors.
4. Finally, the many excellent sailing magazines available world wide covering a variety of all of the above. None are available right here, right now, by category in a normalised and easily understood format. None are free to the user. None allow the user to enhance or correct it to make it better, right here, right now.
Plus when inyourfootsteps.com focuses on an area, such as the work commenced in Ireland and discussed above, there is nothing that can compare with the breadth, depth and simplicity of information structure it provides.
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