[iRail] Community updates 11/2010

Wed Nov 24 00:10:54 UTC 2010

Hi iRail-people!

It's time for some community updates. Sit back and take a few minutes to
read this. Community updates are only needed when a big team of people
is working together on something huge. Yes... That's what we have
become. But, I don't want to bore you with numbers, here come updates:

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INDEX:

A | FOR HUMANS

1. NPO (vzw/asbl)
2. Schedule
3. NMBS won't bother us anymore
4. Help testing our applications

B | FOR DEVELOPERS

00. iRail API
01. Github
10. BeTrains
11. Wrappers

(If you'd rather read the Community updates online:
http://project.irail.be/cgi-bin/trac.fcgi/wiki/CU1110 )

-------------------------------------

A | FOR HUMANS

1. NPO (vzw/asbl)

We are still starting a non-profit organization. Before we can start we
need a to decide a lot of things. Here is what we have come up with, in
a little interview

° What is the NPO for?

The goal of the NPO is to support iRail so it can provide open transport
data free from money or copyright issues. People who write clients upon
the iRail API will be able to join the NPO for free. By doing that they
become iRail themselves and thus have not to worry about any conflict
with other corporations.

° Who will be leading the NPO?

Yeri T, Christophe V and Pieter C

° The name?

iRail.

° Is there any task still open?

YES! Glad you ask! We need someone to take care of the finances. Any
volunteer who'd like to do that?

° Will members have to pay?

We will have 2 kind of members: Members who want to support or cause and
pay a yearly fee (we agreed on 10€/month → 120€/year) and Members who
contribute code. The latter don't pay a fee at all.

° Money honey?

Spending: Not at this moment. We are a NPO and we do not intend to make
money with the iRail API. Our goal is solely to make people use the data
without anything standing in the way. We create a «free market» around
this data. If you want to make a business around the iRail API, be our
guest!

Receiving: We do at this moment. We are a NPO and we intend to receive
from people who care that this project stays alive and kicking. For
instance, it's very important if your business runs on our API that our
API stays alive. So keep us well fed with a voluntary percentage of your
gain. We use the money to organize developer meetings, to fund ourselves
(yes, this is becoming an expensive hobby...), to buy servers, to buy
github services and last but not least, promotion!

2. Schedule

I would like to share our schedule before we go into a small
winter-sleep. (50% of our team are students and students got
examinations)

(note: this is a draft. It probably won't happen as drafted)

Week of 22/11:

* We're rewriting the mobile webclient (iRail.be). It will be using
jsonp and will be detached from the API's code. It will be housed in a
different git repository as well. Mathias Baert is doing an excellent
job on the javascript right now. Mathias Beynens is going to do the html
+ css afterwards. (I have high expectations)

* We will be pushing APIv1.0 (now on dev.api) to the api.iRail.be
server.

Week of 29/11:

* Setting op blog.iRail.be and getting the word out - our community
updates and recent news will appear in one central place.

* As last week we got ourselves a great JSONP-wrapper, we will now focus
on an application suggested by Christophe Petit-Jean. We will make a
widget which will be shown on a TV screen to be put in offices. If
afterwards we help Christophe setting this up he might do a generous
donation to the NPO.

* iGoogle widget release

First half of December:

* Testing phase of BeTrains for maemo, BeTrains alpha for bada and
BeTrains for WP7.

Second half of December

* Release of BeTrains for WP7
* Release of BeTrains for maemo
* Release of BeTrains for bada

* Meeting: what will we do in February?
probably: 
 - FOSDEM!
 - support for buses! (depends on Van Quickenborne)
 - iPhone app
 - Qr-code campaign (more later)
 - Social features on webclient: Share this app
 - Take a share in iRail: the more people you refer to BeTrains/iRail
the more % share you get in the iRail buzz-iness.
 - Delay-tracker: track delays and make a guess for the future.
 - Train-load warning: It's not pleasant to take the train to Ghent on a
Sunday evening. Nor when people return from Werchter.
 - And much more!

3. NMBS won't bother us anymore

but... They won't help us either. Peter Dedecker (www.peterdedecker.eu)
asked a question about iRail in the parliament to Inge Vervotte. It was
slightly positive: they won't use lawyers to bother us anymore. Our
comments about this are expressed over here:

http://bonsansnom.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/vervotte-beantwoordt-irail/
(Dutch)

The most important comment: Vervotte mentions that we should agree on
some points with the NMBS before using the data. Our point is (still)
that the NMBS does not own the data so they can't force us to accept
certain conditions. We are however eager to talk to them about
conditions at least if we knew what they were. We have never heard about
one condition.

4. Help testing our applications!

Do you have a smartphone? I bet we have a native client! For android and
maemo you can get testing executables.

Maemo: https://github.com/iRail/BeTrains.Qt/downloads
Android: http://code.google.com/p/betrains/

for other platforms you can compile from source and test it if you feel
adventurous:

iphone: http://code.google.com/p/betrainsiphone/ 
Symbian: https://github.com/iRail/BeTrains.Qt/
Windows phone 7:
https://github.com/dieterdp/BeTrains-for-Windows-Phone-7
bada: https://github.com/iRail/BeTrains.Bada
iGoogle-widget: https://github.com/iRail/iRailForGoogle
General widget: https://github.com/iRail/Web

B | FOR DEVELOPERS

00. The iRail API

For those who haven't noticed, the dev API has gained some functions:
 * liveboards - These are the schedules that you can see when you enter
a station. Now you can also use them in json/xml/jsonp!
 * vehicle - With this function you can get information about 1 specific
vehicle: where is it going, when will it arrive in which station, ...

Changes/Additions in syntax:

 * Now you can use id=BE.NMBS.123 for a station, instead of
from/to/station=AALST
 * Time is now fully iso 8601 compliant as seconds are added
 * location="X Y" has changed into locationX="X" locationY="Y"

! These additions are currently only available in the dev.api.irail.be -
They're almost ready for release. Take into account that you cannot use
dev.api.irail.be for a stable release of your application since it might
break often. For your stable release use the api.irail.be which will be
updated soon.

01. The Github association

We have a github association page from now on. Access it through
http://github.com/iRail (doesn't that look nice?)

This allows us to list all members working on a github repository. We
can manage each user's right to commit on a certain branch. If you need
more rights, just ping Yeri or Pieter.

10. BeTrains for X

* We need help on BeTrains for iPhone. At this moment we cannot
outbetter the iphone app bought by the NMBS. We have to be more stable,
faster, user-friendlier, ... Do you know someone who can code objective
C? Refer him to us!

* Same for blackberry, except that we don't have any code yet. Do you
want to code for blackberry? Do you know someone? Get in touch!

11. Wrappers

Don't rewrite code that we have written already. We have quite some
wrappers listed on the github project page.

http://github.com/iRail/

Thanks for reading this entirely. It takes a lot of courage to read such
a great email. Therefor, the first one to mail me (personally) with "I
need a beer" will get free beer on the next meet-up.

Yours sincerely,

Pieter