FW: RE: transit.511.org website - barcamp follow up

[Margaret Okuzumi]

well, so much for lower key, but I don't know how else to get this
information out to folks other than to forward to the list. Perhaps someone
can volunteer to be a sort of gatekeeper or maintain a forum to prevent
redundant inquiries. I trust y'all can figure out some way to self-regulate
so that they'll remain open to working with the developer community.

Margaret
Sent via wireless

-----Original Message-----
From: "Thomas Spiekerman" <tspie...@mtc.ca.gov>
Date: Thursday, Feb 28, 2008 1:01 pm
Subject: RE: transit.511.org website - barcamp follow up
To: "Margaret Okuzumi" <oku...@silcon.com>

Hi Margaret,

Thank you for inviting us to your event last weekend. I hope that I was
able to shed some light on how we operate with the transit agencies, and
answer basic questions for the attendees adequately.

As I mentioned, I'm providing the contact email address for those who want
to investigate our transit data feed setup. They should send an email
request to this address:

tra...@511.org

and we'll send further information about accessing the feed.

Due to our extremely heavy development load at the moment, we've kept this
feed as a soft launch for the time being. We're hoping that we can keep it
to a manageable load until we launch our new website in May.
So, if it's possible to keep this a little lower key for the time being
rather than trumpeting it widely quite yet, we can probably be more
responsive. Again, our time available for questions or trouble shooting
will be pretty limited on this for awhile.

One follow up idea occurred to me based on the questions that I heard, and
it's one that I've heard many times before. That is, the idea of improving
the information related to company shuttles and other
"last-mile" shuttles from rail stations in particular, which we are not able
to include widely in the trip planner.

I think that could be a great application for someone to work on, in a way
that we cannot right now. If someone focused on a specific set of highly
used shuttles (which are not included in our trip planner), and can gather
the route/schedule information from the shuttles' own
websites, it could be a good tie-in with our trip planner when a trip starts
or ends at a rail station served by those shuttles.

We will be creating a "white label" interface for the new trip planner,
which will allow users to embed our new transit trip planner entry form into
their website. If they programmed a list of rail stations to be populated
into the start and/or end points from their site, they may be able to
combine that with a highly usable interface that they could
create to show shuttle trips possible to or from these "end point"
stations - essentially the first or last leg of a trip plan. That's
where their creativity would come in. This embedded trip planner
interface will be coming out after the main May rollout of our new trip
planner, and is planned for sometime around summer.

Anyway, that's just one idea among many, and is actually one that
wouldn't require them to repurpose a data feed (I'm sure they have other
ideas related to data feed applications as well).

As we get closer to hands-on testing of our new website design, likely in
late March, I will contact you again to see if you are interested in
participating in that.

Thanks.

Tom

[GaryAir]

Maybe we should consider setting up a Google group for them. Then
they can monitor and chime in when they have the time. Or maybe they
should consider GetSatisfaction.com. For now, maybe we should just
let Joe deal with them, since Google has a good history of making what
they get available to others. Maybe Joe will suggest a way forward.
Gate keeping is tricky business; a forum of some sort makes more sense
to me. I imagine things would probably stay civilized without too
much moderation necessary.

Dave

On Feb 29, 1:01 pm, "Margaret Okuzumi" <okuz...@silcon.com> wrote:
> well, so much for lower key, but I don't know how else to get this
> information out to folks other than to forward to the list. Perhaps someone
> can volunteer  to be a sort of gatekeeper or maintain a forum to prevent
> redundant inquiries. I trust y'all can figure out some way to self-regulate
> so that they'll remain open to working with the developer community.
>
> Margaret
> Sent via wireless
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: "Thomas Spiekerman" <tspieker...@mtc.ca.gov>
> Date: Thursday, Feb 28, 2008 1:01 pm
> Subject: RE: transit.511.org website - barcamp follow up
> To: "Margaret Okuzumi" <okuz...@silcon.com>
>
> Hi Margaret,
>
> Thank you for inviting us to your event last weekend.  I hope that I was
> able to shed some light on how we operate with the transit agencies, and
> answer basic questions for the attendees adequately.
>
> As I mentioned, I'm providing the contact email address for those who want
> to investigate our transit data feed setup.  They should send an email
> request to this address:
>

> tran...@511.org

> Tom- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Joe Hughes]

Thanks for your nomination, Gary. I wrote to the given email address
yesterday, though I have yet to hear anything back. In the meantime,
though, I just created a Google Group called "Transit Developers":
http://groups.google.com/group/transit-developers

I encourage anyone who's interested in transit software development,
third-party sites, and working with real transit data feeds to join.

Joe