[Open-transport] Transport track at OKFestival and action points

Sat Sep 22 13:37:42 UTC 2012

Hi all,

Great to have met a few of you at Helsinki's Open Knowledge Festival!
For those who were not there, I've got some minutes for you:

* The open transport working group (basically this mailinglist for now)
organised an Open Transport track inside the Open Cities track organised
on 3 days.
* On Monday we have had the ePSI sectoral meeting: a workshop for the
European Commission on transport data. During the workshop we have used
a format by Marc de Vries to come up with an Open Transport Data
manifesto. I hope I can share this document with you a little later this
week. Goal of the document is to have a reference document about current
issues.
* On Tuesday we have had some talks about public transport
specifications (GTFS and SIRI) and we have discussed various projects in
Europe.
* On Wednesday we have hosted 3 workshops: turning Helsinki's data into
GTFS, a tangible user interface workshop (prototyping transit apps using
paper and scissors) and we have had a kick-off to write the open
transport data handbook.

This is not the end however. To set up the working group properly, I've
got some action points which I would love us to collaborate on in the
very near future:

1. The Open Transport Data Handbook:

We're writing an open transport data handbook for policy makers. The
handbook, with a similar TOC as the open data handbook, will focus on
"why" and "how". I have set up a google document. If you would like to
contribute let me know. As of this moment it is in a rather early stage
I will only share it on request. Next week it will be open for everyone
to edit/comment.

2. transport.okfn.org

The website for our working group needs updates: blog, content, about,
etc. I would just love it if someone could help contributing. If you
want to help out on this, send me an e-mail and I'll add you to the
wordpress admins.

3. An international transport data portal

Together with the CKAN people at OKFN we want to set up a data portal
for transport data (public transport, taxis, parking spots, ferries,
etc). When for instance GTFS is given, we will set up a continuous
integration system for it, which tests the data and sends feedback to
the data owner on uploading.

The data portal will also be an open-source app portal: the purpose of
this is that work is not done a thousand times over: a journey planner
interface, for instance, could be easily reused.

Do you know CKAN/python? Does this seem like a great project?
Contributors to this are really welcome as well!

Kind regards,

Pieter

-- 
OKFN Belgium vzw/asbl
+32 (0) 486/747122