At least 20 members of the OpenTransportNet (OTN) team, including 21c’s Managing Partner, Susie Ruston McAleer, and Project Coordinator, Aneta Rapacz, packed a meeting room in Birmingham’s impressive REP theatre last week (20-21 May 2015) to undertake a rapid sprint workshop on pilot development.
The aim of the workshop was to define the ‘proof-of-concept’ approach that each city would take to test the usefulness of the OTN Hubs visualization approach for solving transport related problems with open data and geographic information.
Joined by an independent Functional Analyst the technical and city teams worked closely together exploring city location variables to arrive at specific ‘innovation’ scenarios with accompanying user-journeys that meet each of the four pilot cities specific transport needs whilst advancing the state-of-the-art in using data for co-creation. New applications that will be created using the Data Hubs include; a real-time service for reporting minor traffic accidents in Birmingham; a service to improve real-time information for cyclists in Antwerp; a multi-modal trip planner in Issy-les-Moulineaux; and an emergency response planner for the Liberec Region.
21c are pleased to report that first data – and semantic – uploads have been made to the analytics hubs which will be released to a closed testing group in July 2015. The first test sprint cycle will help the OTN team understand how the users access, utilise and understand the data, before making changes and inviting wider citizen groups, civil servants and developer communities to participate in a series of transport related co-creation challenges.
To express interest in joining a data users workshop in one of the pilot cities - Birmingham (UK), Antwerp (Belgium), Issy les Moulineaux (France) or the Liberec Region (Czech Republic) please contact the Project Team. Alternatively, we'd love you to join us on Twitter – @OpenTnet.