Sat 2 Jun 2007
WhereCamp
Posted by Joe Hughes under Events
I had a great time at the (hopefully) inaugural WhereCamp SF today. Brandon Martin-Anderson (of Graphserver fame) and I ended up leading a session on “Hacking Public Transportation”, where we had an interesting discussion about transit mashups, the difficulties of getting transit data from agencies, and how neo-geographers and transit hackers can help transit agencies and their riders (fortuitously, Stella Wotherspoon from the MTC was in the audience). Other highlights:
- Greg Sadetsky’s work with Poly9 in aggregating transit schedule data (some of it hard-won through Canadian FOIAs).
- OpenStreetMaps’s progress in building unencumbered maps of the U.K. (and other sundry areas) through user data contributions. They’re still lacking in U.S. coverage, but it seemed like a cabal was forming to help out with that during the unconference.
- Dennis Crowley’s talk about his experiments in GPS/SMS-enabled ski slope gaming, and seeing a mockup of Plundr on a DS Lite.
Even though I won’t make it back for the second day, it was well worth the trek down to the valley. Thanks to Anselm and the others who helped put this event together!
June 7th, 2007 at 4:17 pm
Hi, It was nice to meet you at WhereCamp!
It was my first experience of bar-camp style unconference. Quite inspiring! I hope more urban planners would engage in this discourse.
You may know well about the concept of Transit Oriented Development (TOD). TOD is a kind of very trendy term currently in American urban planning. Portland in Oregon is the signature city that has been putting enormous efforts to shape the city based on the public transit system. Even LA started to take this approach to improve their notorious automobile-driven city structure.
I just happened to think, since the planner’s world mostly considers the hardware side of transit, if we can bring an innovative operation system simultaneously at the planning stage from the making, that would change the city better.