Sharing the Love!

Avid skydiver and ace software engineer Rob Jonson has tweaked his Skydive Designer App to facilitate Open Source Skydiving – everyone worldwide can view the dive plans and use them for inspiration.

How often have you seen an awesome skydiving picture and wondered to yourself “How did they get to that?”

Or seen a handful of photos and wondered “Are those points from the same skydive?”

If your questions pertain to Milko & Siân’s “Hib in the Sun’ event organized at Skydive Hibaldstow, then wonder no more… Every jump we did on this excellent weekend has been uploaded and shared. You can see the plan and a bunch of the completion pictures. For example – how cool is it to see that this fantastic image…

It’s the fourth point of this skydive, viewed in Skydive Designer

You can see all 13 jumps – complete with pics right here.

I’m a coder by profession. Over the last couple of decades, sharing the ‘secret code’ of software has gone from being something controversial to becoming a standard practice where almost all software is built on shared tools and libraries. Coders have realised that the more we share – the better we can all become.

I hope that we’re on the cusp of a similar revolution in skydiving! There are organisers out there who will jealously guard their skydive designs, but there are others who will generously share them. The magic is that when you share your jumps, you don’t lose anything.

Nobody is going to look at this collection of skydives and think “We don’t need Milko to organise any more”

Nothing I ever do is secret!

Milko Hodgkinson

Hopefully some organisers will learn some tricks from these and be inspired to come up with (and share) new creations. Perhaps another organiser will throw one of two of these jumps into their weekend “Let’s try this jump by Milko!”

I know that I have a handful of ‘classic’ jumps that I pull out of the bag on occasion. There is the Bob Stumm classic four-way that lets you throw people around the sky at the end of a boogie-day (taught to me by Mike Crow). And there is Bill Legard’s 6-way brain teaser that I can never quite get right… Or Rob Colpus’s well-named Donut-Bipole-Brainlock dive.

Here is another collection from the Euro Big-way Camp run by Lesley, Milko and Siân.

There are so many more fantastic jumps, and as people start to share their creations online – we can all learn from them, re-use them, tweak them for our own group and build on them – whilst of course being careful to acknowledge and credit the creator.

I can’t wait to see the first pictures or videos on Facebook from another group attempting one of these dives with a credit ‘original design by Milko Hodgkinson from the Hib in the Sun collection’.

Video – Fun in the Sun

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If you want to know more about the Skydive Designer App check out this article written by Lesley Gale.

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