Tag: transitcamp

Metronauts already has a website, of course, but there’s more to an online community than a website: it’s about enabling and fostering collaboration. The Metronauts site is a place for people who are passionate about transit in the greater Toronto area.

There are a three main collaboration features on the site: conversations, projects and events. Conversations and projects are similar to blog posts in that you can create one, add tags (using your own folksonomy), and add comments to one started by someone else. You can vote for your favourite conversations to improve their karma (popularity). Events are a bit more structured, in that they have information such as date/time and location that can be fed into calendaring formats.

This isn’t just for "official" (if there were such a thing) Metronaut website people to add conversations, projects and events; anyone in the community can participate, such as Rannie Turingan’s project for a visual essay contest. Events can be big ones like today’s TransitCamp, or smaller events focused on specific transit topics. Any other page on the site can include embedded video, photos, slides and other multimedia.

Ideas for publicizing the efforts:

• Flash mob of Metronauts on a busy transit route in order to raise awareness of transit issues.
• Volunteer advocates to help distribute transit information at major stations: the Metronauts Ground Crew.
• How do we engage drivers in the conversation to get them involved and interested in transit?
• Create Facebook events for things such as "take transit to work day", where you can invite your Facebook friends who typically drive to try out transit.

Outstanding questions about the site:

• What should the Metronauts site be? When to use the Metronauts site directly versus linking to a social networking site such as Facebook?
• What is the role of a Metronauts site moderator?
• How do we syndicate or blogroll external blog posts onto the site?
• How do we involve people who aren’t particularly tech-savvy, both in terms of presenting simplified interfaces and training/mentoring? This is a classic problem with any sort of user-generated content site, where more than half of the population isn’t even visiting the site, and a large portion of the remainder are spectators or occasional commenters.

Metrolinx is also seeking engagement with the community, both through the Metronauts site and through other venues that they might use to allow community involvement in the transit planning process.

Mark Mulholland organized a session on leveraging worldwide knowledge about transit, since there’s more and more groups everywhere who are trying to improve their transit systems. Why not use the wisdom of the crowds to leverage good ideas that have been proven elsewhere to get the most bang for our limited bucks? There are also opportunities to collaborate with other transit-focused groups, as opposed to just picking up their ideas, to develop new ideas together and potentially create open source solutions that can be shared.

Ideas for fostering collaboration and idea exchange with other transit advocates from around the circle:

• Exchange programs for staff in transit organizations (opposition to this idea: "I don’t want to pay for politicians to travel around on my tax dollars"). The current problem is that it’s mostly politicians who are doing the travelling to look at other transit systems, not the staff at the transit systems who can actually implement the solutions. An interesting discussion of Metrolinx’s recent trip to the UK and Madrid, including a link to their report, is here.
• Important to look at the context: what works in one country won’t work in another because of political and economic conditions.
• Ability to share stories from transit experiences around the world, both from the point of view of visitors and residents.
• Need to find transit expertise worldwide and incorporate that into our local projects.
• Look at our needs, and find places in the world that have had to address those same needs. In other words, work from the needs rather than a presupposed solution.
• Leverage local bi-national chambers of commerce (e.g., Indo-Canadian, Australian-Canadian) to find similar groups in other countries.
• Add links to other TransitCamps and transit-related groups to this wiki to make it easy to find other like-minded groups.
• There need to be links from the community back into the transit organizations to ensure that the ideas generated are considered for use. In general, how do we cross-pollinate between the community and the transit organizations?
• We need to consider ideas from other transit systems about customer service standards, and understand the customer service problems that we have now with our local transit systems.
• Public online forum for collaboration and capturing information (such as this TransitCamp wiki, Vancouver’s TransitCamp which is supposed to be here but isn’t, and San Francisco’s TransitCamp links), and for publishing research and findings from transit authorities such as Metrolinx. For example, transit geeks in San Francisco are using Get Satisfaction as a forum for discussions about transit in a very user-friendly question-and-answer format rather than a more free-form (and sometimes more intimidating) wiki format.

The wiki page for this session, which includes these notes of mine plus other attendees’ contributions, is here.

My friend Kieran, as a result of last year’s TransitCamp, got together with a couple of other transit/technology geeks to create MyTTC, a community-driven site for Toronto transit information that will launch in about two weeks, in time for the next TransitCamp event. They did this in response to the deficiencies of the official TTC website, which is famously bad for providing decent information about actually using the third most heavily used transit system in North America.

MyTTC is focused primarily on routes and schedules, and contains all of the route and schedule data that they’ve gleaned from the TTC site and other sources. Each route is mapped using embedded Google Maps, with individual stops marked and the arrival times expected for surface vehicles at each stop. There’s also transfer information for each stop and route, so that you can see which other routes connect to that route and stop, and other context-sensitive information about stops.

But it’s more than just a static information site; it has a lot of wiki-like aspects for user-generated content (although it’s built on Ruby and Merb rather than a wiki platform). Users can add stops to routes — the TTC routes/schedules only show main stops, not every stop — and the scheduled time for the newly-added stops will be interpolated from the existing data. Users can also add other context-sensitive information about stops, such as typical delays at certain times of day, points of interest, and places to wait out of the weather where you can see the bus/streetcar approaching. Users can also bookmark their favourite stops, which will appear on their personalized home page when they’re logged in.

One of the largest issues that they’ve had, and are likely to continue to have, is getting data from the TTC: many transit authorities are notoriously miserly with their data, in spite of the fact that it’s created mostly with public funding. For MyTTC, they used the route and schedule data that’s available on the TTC site, much of it captured manually (and painfully), but TTC hasn’t been willing to share any data in a more easily-ingestible form, or to share the data that will soon be generated by global positioning systems on surface vehicles. This, of course, is a political problem rather than a technical problem, and likely others will need to be involved to help resolve this.

MyTTC is attempting to create a platform where the data is fully open (although they are not, at this time, making the code open source): they will be providing full XML and JSON APIs, SQL dumps of the data, and GTFS (Google Transit Feed Spec). In fact, their contacts at Google have said that Google Transit will accept their data in place of TTC’s, likely because it’s more accessible and complete. They don’t plan to monetize the APIs, but would rather have other sites export the data and use it for their own purposes directly.

The platform itself is transit system-agnostic, and could be used for any transit system. There’s explicit support for the iPhone, and other mobile platforms such as Blackberry will be tested — in fact, I think that I just volunteered for that. There are plans for some SMS interfaces, such as being able to send an SMS message to the site with your current location and get back related information, and we discussed the use of Twitter including direct access (like the BART experiment last year) and Twitter-based applications (like CommuterFeed). They also want to add a trip planner to MyTTC before the launch.

The wiki page for this session, which includes these notes of mine plus other attendees’ contributions, is here.