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genoyamamoto

Two separate incident forums

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I haven't jumped in some time but I do check in here occasionally and have noticed over time that there are two types of incidents in skdiving: routine and unusual. At the risk of sounding harsh/heartless, I would like to propose that the incidents forum be separated into a "routine" incidents forum and an "unusual" incidents forum.

I think this will do at least two things. First, having a routine incidents forum will make it more obvious how often people make the same mistakes, e.g. hooking it in. Perhaps it will make some people think twice about what they do when they are at the dz.

Secondly, separating all the routine, nothing to learn from incidents from the true WTF type incidents may help to focus the community's awareness onto what are truly tragic incidents that we can all learn from. Some past examples are tandem incidents, slink cover incidents/fatalities, camera suit/gear and wingsuit related incidents.

In terms of implementation, I think initially all incidents should probably be classified as unusual until proven otherwise.

What do you all think?

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We've talked about that but not in the terms you are using.

I think it would be very hard to separate "routine" from "unusual" since every incident is a bit different. Is someone who got hit and killed by someone else unusual? It used to be, not any more. Is someone under a Velocity who hooks it into the ground unusual? It was when the Velo first came out, not any more. Would someone going in with nothing out be unusual? It used to be commonplace but now it's quite unusual.

>Secondly, separating all the routine, nothing to learn from incidents from the true WTF type incidents . . .

I think this would have the opposite of the desired effect. Odds are the skydivers are going to die from one of the common causes - hooking themselves into the ground, running into someone else, getting run into by someone else. Those are the things we really have to work on, and those are the things (I think) that the Incidents forum works best to prevent. If you see five collisions a year on Incidents people are going to start thinking "shit that could happen to ME - maybe I should land far away . . . "

Compare that to an incident like a slink failure incident. That's very, very unusual, and the person in that incident wasn't killed. If you're going to focus someone's (limited) attention on something, should it be on the possibility of slink failure or on the possibility of colliding with someone in a crowded landing area? The latter is a lot more likely to kill them.

However we have talked about separating the forum into two - one very heavily moderated one where you need to get all posts approved by a moderator, which contains only firsthand, secondhand (i.e. actual observers) or vetted third hand opinions. This would contain only perhaps a dozen posts with eyewitness accounts, comments from DZO's, S+TA's etc and that's it. The other would be for people who wanted to talk about the incident. That way there would be an abbreviated report for people who just wanted the bare facts and another forum where they could post "gee, I wonder if X happened" to their heart's content.

Do you think that would make it easier to navigate and find the "unusual" incidents more quickly?

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Hey billvon,

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I really like the approach you outlined and I think it makes a lot of sense to have a heavily moderated forum where the facts, or whatever approximates facts could be posted. I think this would go a long way towards getting relevant information out to people in a timely manner. One thing I would ask is that it not be reduced to an online version of the incidents section in parachutist.

I understand your point about having the opposite of the desired effect, but i'm not 100% on board with you yet. I think people will always discuss every incident, whether they are classified as routine or unusual. I thought that having a "routine" incidents forum would ultimately put people on notice as to the frequency of routine vs. unusual events. So the spirit of my original post was not really about finding unusual incidents, but rather to highlight the alarming rate at which people continue to make the same mistakes.

You also mentioned how the notion of "routine" evolves. I think it would be interesting academically to see how the community's definition of "routine" changes over time. For example, weren't no-pull's fairly routine before AAD's, and now it's low turns? But as a friend pointed out, the classification of an incident as routine could become a point of serious contention/debate and detract from the purpose of n incidents forum. So i'm not sure how realistic it would be to implement my original idea.

What do you think?

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>For example, weren't no-pull's fairly routine before AAD's, and now it's low turns?

Yep, and several others have changed. (Collisions, hard opening injuries etc)

>But as a friend pointed out, the classification of an incident as routine
>could become a point of serious contention/debate and detract from the
>purpose of n incidents forum.

Yeah, that's the problem of separating them but still allowing anyone to post in either - there would be endless arguments over which one was routine and which one was novel.

We've been talking about the 'facts-only' forum for a while but in the end Sangiro and Meso make all the decisions on new forums.

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