I would be willing to contribute to this open-source design, but I'm not going to "pull-the-car" on this project.

I think such a project has many advantages. It educates the sailors which I think to be very important. There is just too much misunderstanding about and the F16's need a skilled crew to really get it going. And I think it will be very helpful to sailors who are looking to adjust their boats to personal preferences. This in fact helps out our dealors and builders as it is very hard for them to deliver "perfect" boats for the inexpensive price we demand of them. Besides "perfect" is different for everybody else. It will be very attractive for the sailors to do their own part in this setup and an open sourse design that lists several alternatives for each aspect will be excellent here.

Additionally it will be a promotional dream. Already we attract many sailors from other classes who are looking to read about these things. An open source probject like this will only spread the name familiarity of F16 more and could really help in its international growth. Also it can show that proper lightweight designing can both be dependendable and simple.

And such a owners/volunteers driven open source project will be a gold mine for the professional designers and builders to see what people prefer and what alternatives may exist to their current way of doing things. They don't have to invest alot of their own time, and were are talking alot of time here, or large sums of money by having an employee research the matters. All this will only help the builders and our class as a whole. It will definately act as a continuing market research and customer feedback project.

Of course it will also be a lot of fun for the persons involved.

However like Ncik says, we need a small team of supervisors that are scientifically capable to run the show and seperate unfounded "stories" from scientifically founded fact. This will be a most important role and a hard one to forfil. I know because we went through such a setup when we first drafted the F16 rules. You got to have a very clear view and policy of what is scientifically founded and what is not. You can decide to have a seperate section to give wild idea's a chance but it needs to be set apart from the main project. Otherwise you are getting nowhere, believe me.

Also we should set up our own dedicated website and not use wikipedia for this. Again this is a job for a dedicated person.


If you guys are succesful in getting this up and running then I'm willing to contribute heavily to it in the way of designing.

Wouter