Our annual meeting will be January 10, 2022, 10am – noon Pacific Time (18:00-20:00 UTC), online. Tentative agenda:
For login or other information, please email us at info@opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org
Our annual meeting is normally held in conjunction with the Transportation Research Board annual meeting. This year’s annual meeting, like TRB itself, will be entirely virtual, and will be 1pm-3pm EST on January 11, 2021. The program will include discussion of how transit agencies and OneBusAway have responded to the pandemic, a well as updates on the latest developments for the OneBusAway systems and apps. We will also have the annual election for the OTSF board of directors. More details will be posted soon. In the meantime, if you would like to get the information for connecting to the virtual meeting, please send email to info@opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org.
We’ve had an annual meeting of the OneBusAway project for quite a few years, and we are happy to announce that starting this coming year it will become the annual meeting of the new Open Transit Software Foundation! It will be on January 12, 2020, in association with the annual TRB meeting in Washington DC. We will also have a facility for remote participation.
The agenda will include a report on the state of the new organization, the different production instances of OneBusAway, significant technical achievements in the last year, collaboration with other open transit software projects, a roadmap for future work, and election of the new Board for OTSF for 2020.
Please see the 2020 Annual Meeting page for more details. (That page will also be updated with more information as we pin down plans for the meeting.)
After ten years of existence, OneBusAway keeps on growing. At the Transportation Research Board conference in Washington DC earlier this month, OneBusAway joined forces with OpenTripPlanner to host its annual meeting. The open-source community got together to share the year’s accomplishments and discuss next steps.
This year, open-source developers have added new features into the app. Sean Barbeau from USF worked with Microsoft Research to add Embedded Social, a new social platform allowing users to make comments. Links to regional fare payment apps were added for Tampa, Puget Sound, and Sand Diego. HART worked with Cambridge Systematics to deploy a new service alerts platform developed in coordination with WMATA. Sean Crudden developed a new prediction method (part of TheTransitClock) based on machine learning to better forecast vehicle arrivals in unstable conditions such as passenger crowding, inclement weather, and congestion.
The mobile app is being deployed all over the world. New instances were implemented in Sroda Wielkopolska, Poland, Jackson County, Oregon, and more. San Diego MTS now runs OneBusAway on its website and as its native app. HART in Tampa, FL, integrated its streetcar service into the app.
Ten years after getting started by two Ph.D. students at University of Washington, OneBusAway is still powered by the open-source community. It thrives thanks to the academics, transit agencies, and developers who keep contributing.
Slides from the meeting are available online:
If you would like to get involved, don’t hesitate to reach out at info@opentransitsoftwarefoundation.org
Simon J. Berrebi
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