Hey all, the idea of the site is to help reduce theft, not necessarily by returning the bikes listed on there, as we probably all know they are never to be seen again, but to collect a shed load of data on thefts, and from that educate people on how to keep their bikes.
There's no good sources of data for bike thefts out there (gov data out of date, no detail, other services charge and don't have the detail, etc), so what better way to get it than ask people to put it in themselves? With all this data we can start to build a picture of what, where and how the bikes are going missing, and then draw up stats, showing what works and what doesn't.
The other big purpose is to get all this data on-line for others to use. There's a lot of people campaigning for better security products, better policing and the like, so this will hopefully empower them by giving them good hard stats they can use.
Basically educating people by showing them clearly, without rumour or bull-****, what's working and what isn't, where you should park and what's being done about theft hot-spots. Beyond that, it's up to the community to do something about it with all the info.
Hopefully you can see it a year down the line when it has a ton more data, when there's loads more features on the site, like the ability to subscribe to a post-code and get notifications when bikes are stolen from the area, free vehicle checks, etc... It just needs more data.. So please spread the word
SoulKiss... This is an open venture. Open-source and community run. That's where it's heading. It's non-profit. I'm involved as I've had my third bike stolen now and I've had enough. There's no gain, it's for all of us. Time to level the playing field!
Fizzy Fish... It's international, not London based. It just happens that londonbikers.com backed it and got it out the door. This is for everyone.
Also, we have a warning when adding a location that says be cautious of adding home addresses' for obvious reason. In this case we recommend moving the marker to somewhere less specific but still in the area, say the town centre? We don't want anything bad to happen, but we do need good location data all the same.