Alex is right to highlight this. We discussed (on Twitter) the merits of open systems (open data, open health, open innovation) and seemed to agree that openness creates opportunity but it requires individuals to provide innovation.
Code4Pizza is a local group I’ve started to get folk working on projects which are ‘open’. By open, I mean that anyone can contribute, anyone can benefit and as an additional bonus, the projects will generally have a public service value slant. The current project, OpenTranslink, is the result of several months of work by a group of people to get the timetable and route data (most notably, Mark Bennett from the DFP who is part of the team reponsible for OpenDataNI)
Taking the OpenTranslink project as an example. When you travel to a new country, one of the most impenetrable aspects of their culture is their public transport system. This is difficult enough when the native language is not a barrier, but very difficult when the language is different. Nearly every region is developing a suite of apps to run on iPhones, Android phones and Blackberry phones which carries the bulk of their public transport data. I’d wonder – however – if data from other regions shouldn’t be included in “Transport’-type apps.
You innovate with your technology and your design – but from then you just plug regional data into it. Differentiate based on your innovation but you collaborate across regions to provide a seamless experience for the foreign traveller.
In essence – once the clever chaps doing the OpenTranslink data visualisations, API, application logic and interface design are finished, what’s stopping them doing exactly the same for London buses, bus systems in San Francisco, trams in Lyon?
I’d actually thought about this myself given that the Translink system works on what I think is a UK standard for transport.
Since the project is working on this standard, any other users of this standard should be able to take the projects code/application and just plugin their own data and it should “just work”.
It’s never that simple though, is it? My current company works in real estate (in N. America). You’d think that it would all just work, whether it’s real estate in New York or Texas, especially given that there are standards.
Standards don’t mean a whole lot when they are loose, and regional differences even within the standards make everything into a custom implementation. That doesn’t mean it can’t be done, it just means that the ideal and the real are more often two very different beasts.