Are you newer to the open-source community, perhaps looking to learn more? As you can see on our website, there are benefits to transit agencies in the form of more control and less overall cost to provide riders tools. Open-source is also a community, where coders can invest their time to improve transit tools to make service better and more accessible for riders. Along with our duties of keeping OneBusAway running, many of us serve as advocates for better transit tools, promoters of open and standardized transit data, and researchers trying to understand the implications of rider tools. As part of this, we are trying to create a stronger community around all of these issues, especially open-source code in the transit world.

For this reason, we are teaming up with one of the other major partners in open-source tools, OpenTripPlanner to host a joint event at TRB. We’re meeting Sunday, January 13 from 11 am to 3 pm at the Marriott. We’ll also have a phone line if you aren’t attending TRB, but are interested in learning more. Contact Kari Watkins at kari.watkins@ce.gatech.edu if you’d like the call-in information.

Here is an Eventbrite invitation, including the agenda.

And if you are unable to attend either remotely or in person, but want to learn about open-source code and the benefits of it to agencies, contractors, and riders, please check out this link. It is from summer 2017 when one of our major contributors, Sean Crudden, and I did a webinar about the benefits of open-source code.

Best,
Kari
Chair, OneBusAway Board