My Dad used to work for IDRC (www.idrc.ca) and he told me a story about one of his earliest (and happiest) development projects. It's very simple: broadcast actual market price information over radio to farmers in remote rural African areas. In this way, the farmers had enough information to tell the middle man to stuff it when they were offered extremely low (< 1%) of market value for their food. Their wages increased ~10x over the next season.

tl;dr: information symmetry is good for the end of the chains (initial producers, end consumers)

That's a pretty cool program that's evolved with other NGO's using SMS messages to cell phones. The proliferation of mobiles and utility of cheap cell phones has been a massive boost to productivity in rural areas. One of the key market barriers continues to be consistent logistics given the shelf life of agricultural products which means some of these middlemen still have a significant upper hand.

Gentlemen,

Let me introduce you to the power of online snowfall telemetry stations. They usually report air temperature, wind speed & direction, precipitation, snow depth and water content in real time on an hour-by-hour basis. Find one or two nearby your local ski hill and study them for a season, comparing them to your in-the-field perceptions of ski conditions.

You'll soon be telling your friends about the "8 inches of cold dry powder that's just fallen on soft layer that was laid down last week" and distinguishing that from the "8 inches of heavy wet snow that just fell and then refroze onto the ice layer from last week".

For bonus points, take an avalanche safety course in your area. They will introduce you to a wealth of unbiased data sources. Mountain guides use these sources to maintain a deep understanding of the snow pack as it evolves throughout the winter season.

In the Seattle area, see http://www.nwac.us/weatherdata/map/

In the Bay Area, see: http://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/snotel/California/california.ht...

while the measurement may read "inches" it's actually on an arbitrary scale. in other words, to a skier, "14 inches" means compare-the-conditions-to-the-last-time-you-went-and-we-said-14-inches.

not to mention the obvious fact that measurements done in different places with different methods will differ.

I can't decide if I like it or not, but one commenter really takes the opportunity to promote his website:

> I believe "crowdsourcing" is the future of how we'll tap into and retrieve much of the information we desire, in real-time. We designed our entire web site/application (liveskiconditions.com) around the fact that people want to know the current snow conditions [...].

Spam or not?

Not spam.

His comment and website appear very relevant to the radio program, which talks about real-time information from iPhone users suppressing the ski resorts' false reports (say that five times fast).

I would consider it spam if he copied his comment text and pasted it in every NPR summary page that mentioned skiing or snowboarding.

What do people consider a fair ski conditions report site?

twitter seems like it could be useful for this:

"At purgatory, snow is AWESOME!"

"park city snow is SHIT today!"

"ahhh #snowbowl, when are you going to get freaking snow machines already!"

etc. etc.