Finding a place to Skate

Picture taken in Battleground, Washington at a skatepark i found on concrete disciples.

Many skateboarders who travel with their families on vacations, with their school on trips, or just have a car and are able to travel understand the importance of bringing a skateboard along and hitting whatever local parks are existent. There is truly nothing better than hitting a new skate park with a fresh skateboard and a brand new pair of shoes, but how does one find these parks? Throughout my whole life I have been using a website called “Concrete Disciples”, which is basically a skateboarding blog that contains a very useful knowledge community created by skateboarders that enjoy hitting new parks that don’t necessarily know where to find them. The great thing about this community that make me enjoy using it is that fact is shows pictures, videos, vivid descriptions, hours, free or pay, and if the certain park has ever been closed and whether it is open at the time a person visits the site. Members of the site are free to update, comment, and remove parks that have been permanently shut down to make sure skateboarders don’t travel long distances to a nonexistent park. I believe that the freedom of outsiders to comment and help each other makes Concrete Disciples my top knowledge community because it directly correlates to my love of skateboarding. Many times while on vacation, being away from my native St. Louis, I have used the site to find parks in many different states including Utah, Colorado, California, Illinois, Maine, Arizona, Oregon, and Washington. If not for this fantastic knowledge community, I would not have progressed and hit as many parks as I have to this day. I believe that knowledge communities only function because people with similar interests that both know different facts can help each other become more knowledgeable. Concrete Disciples differs from the survivor community in many ways due to subject matter, but the idea is the same. The Survivor people really just wanted to figure the show out before they were “allowed” to see the results, and the easiest way to do so was to start an online community of people with a similar goal in mind. Once they had established that goal, they can all use their separate knowledge to help the group as a whole. In the chapter it talks about how some people might not have ever posted on the site, until the correct time when a person from the town they lived in was on the show, or if they had extensive knowledge about a certain location. The great thing about knowledge communities is a person doesn’t even have to contribute to benefit from the knowledge others have shared. In my case of concrete disciples, I never had a skate park in my town, and all the ones close to me had been listed, so I had nothing to post. I did, however benefit from other peoples posts by being able to find skate parks in new places and visit them on my travels. Knowledge communities as a whole function for the sole purpose of solving a problem through the combination of mind power, whether that be to beat Survivor and figure out the winner before the show airs, or finding a skate park while relaxing in Mexico on vacation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mbh1Wiw60Hg

Video of a few friends and I at a skate park we found.