[open-government] Fwd: FixMyTransport.com launches today (in the UK)

Tue Aug 30 09:34:31 UTC 2011

This is exciting!

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Hello from Blighty!

I'm just posting to this list because the organisation that I run,
mySociety, has just launched our biggest project in three years, and
as open data hackers I thought it might tickle your fancy.

http://FixMyTransport.com has been built with two goals – to make it
easier for people to report public transport problems across Britain,
and to coax people over the line between complaining about something
and campaigning on it. It's first and foremost a user-focussed problem
solving site, and only latterly an open data project.

However, it is still an open data project, and quite a whopper at
that. When we started development, 18 months ago, half the datasets we
needed were expensive (£10,000), hopelessly messy, or non-existent.
Through a combination of a lot of programmatic data scrubbing, a bit
of crowd-sourcing and the general drift in government towards open
data, we have been able to pull together an unprecedented public
transit database. We've got over 300,000 stops and stations, for
example (basically, all of them), plus routes with basic route maps
covering trains, trams, tube, metro, buses, coaches and ferries. We've
doubtless still got all sort of data problems left, but hopefully
exposing all of these nodes and routes as nice, stable URLs with
attractive SEOd HTML and Facebook open-graph friendly metadata will
not only see more re-use but, when the data proves to have
inaccuracies, we hope it will strengthen the case for the public
sector publishing this data in the right way in the first place. We've
also a lot of volunteers to thank for helping build the first ever
database of contact details for transit companies and operators –
without this we'd never be reliably able to pass on problem reports,
and they'd sit uselessly on the web.  I would like to think that in
time the data that underpins FixMyTransport will ultimately be
accessible via something akin to mySociety's Mapit.mysociety.org for
boundaries.

There is, however, a second open data angle, and one that most of our
users will probably find more interesting. We're building on the
http://WhatDoTheyKnow.com  model of automatically published email
exchanges so that it is possible to see all the exchanges of email
between the original complainant and the transport operator, just
check out the bottom part of this page to see an example:

http://www.fixmytransport.com/campaigns/give-free-wifi-if-a-train-journey-is-longer-than-s#

This is useful for all sorts of reasons, partly because it gets recent
status information that might otherwise be hidden inside operators out
onto the Googleable web, and also because it create a dicencentive for
operators to send emails simply designed to make email authors go
away.

But the main point of this mail is to say that it is only a major open
data project because that's what's required to offer a super-simple,
super-usable user experience for users with everyday problems. We
think that's what open data is really all about - offering that raw
materials to build services that really matter.

If you've any questions, please shoot.

all the best,

Tom

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://www.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg