About Us

The Water Polo CI Company has been established to provide services to the water polo community in the British Isles.

The Goals

The initial goals are increased grass roots participation, to give every child of junior school age the experience of playing water polo and the opportunity to carry on playing on a regular basis if they so wish. In facilitating this it will be necessary to increase the numbers of tutors for both teaching and officiating, subsequently increasing the number of teachers and officials to underpin the increased participation. If you are interested in becoming a tutor contact us.

Why water polo

Children want to have fun, throwing a ball about in the swimming pool with your mates, is fun. A happy childhood goes a long way to producing healthy, productive, happy well balanced adults. Water polo promotes fitness, skill and a healthier lifestyle to all age ranges, it also helps children build confidence, stimulates social adjustment, develops discipline and respect for authority.

How will we do it - Open Source

The company will operate an open source project to promote grass roots participation and develop the sport. Open source is a business principle accepting the fact that people work a lot harder on projects they like, and the structure of business will reflect this.

How mass collaboration changes everything
There is a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, "Amateur" was originally rather a complimentary word. Amateur does not mean inferior, but the thing to be in the twenty first century is professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not.

Open source is a new model for business collaboration, although the idea has been around since at least 1714 with Queen Anne and the Longitude prize -http://www.solarnavigator.net/history/john_harrison.htm .

One of the major lessons from open source used by companies like Mozilla, Linux and Wikipedia is that people working for love often surpass those working for money. Companies spend millions to build office buildings for a single purpose: to be a place to work. And yet people working in their own homes, which aren't even designed to be workplaces, end up being more productive.

Another benefit of open source is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source works from bottom-up, people make what they want, and the best idea prevails. Most businesses assume that people working for you have to be employee, with open source; the people are the company, our members work for investment in the company for the benefit of water polo.

Using the insights from our water polo community will move water polo forward. In an open source model it is normal to be transparent, to collaborate, share ideas and best practice, broadcasting both the problems and the solutions, keeping the process open to get further comment and refinement of ideas.

How to Help

The Water Polo Company

Community Interest