In Parts
SPECIAL REPORT/TECHNOLOGY
Working in Wiki: Camping Out
Fourth of five parts: 1 2 3 4 5 Single Page
In the Bay Area, wikis go live to tackle a transit problem.
It started out simply enough. Frustrated transit riders in the San Francisco Bay Area were chatting online about the mishmash of maps that delineate the various transportation systems in the region; about how difficult it is to switch from a transit system in one county to a connecting system in the next, because the schedules don't mesh or because it's hard to read two completely different types of schedules and make any sense of them.
The grumbling ricocheted around in the ether until someone had a bright idea: Why not put transit-agency staff and public officials, transit riders and business people, and technology experts in a room and let them hash out ideas for making these systems work better together? Transit people usually don't get to sit down with technology experts without paying for their services. This was their opportunity.
The opportunity was called Transit Camp — a two-day conference, held in Palo Alto in February, to pull together ideas about how to fix what was broken in inter-county, inter-city transit. Transit enthusiasts got about 100 people from the public and private sectors to show up to brainstorm. The focus was on finding a user-friendly way for riders to navigate between and among two dozen transit systems.
In the wiki world, camps are the new style of conference. They are ad hoc and user-generated, put on by and for participants. There are no conference planners to put together an agenda of sessions. People interested in a particular issue — alerted by e-mail or word of mouth — just show up at the camp. On the fly, attendees discuss problems and demonstrate possible solutions. On a big board, people write down what they plan to talk about, and others sign up to listen.
Somehow, these free-form gatherings sort themselves out. It is the wiki culture gone live. Instead of a lot of people contributing individually to, say, a Facebook site, a crowd of interested people get together in person and contribute thoughts and ideas.
Chris Peeples, president of the board of directors of the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District, says he was bowled over by the "total culture clash" at the Palo Alto camp. There were leaders from the traditional and conservative transit world hanging out with the sneaker-clad crowd of techies.
He also found it energizing. In one session, for instance, a presenter demonstrated how quickly a Web site on transit could be set up. Within minutes of creating the site, four people in the room logged on to their computers and sent comments to the site. It far exceeded, says Peeples, "the speed and responsiveness I'm used to in government."
The camp was a far cry from the usual public meeting where officials speak to and hear from constituents — enduring slings, arrows and the airing of grievances. But in transit camp, no one is in charge of the meeting. Everyone's there to help find answers, not ask someone else to fix things. Transit camp was billed as a "solutions playground" and attendees were warned by a sign there, "If u have complaints, you need to provide solutions."
The first-ever transit camp was held in Toronto last year, followed by a second in Vancouver. Tara Hunt, the co-founder of Citizen Agency, learned of the Canadian camps and thought, "Wow, this is brilliant." She was intrigued by the idea of applying to government an agile, scrappy conference model that fast-moving technology organizations employ for their benefit.
The Palo Alto event was startling and refreshing to Terry Nagel, a city councilwoman in Burlingame. She was struck by the DIY — do it yourself — attitudes of everyone on the scene. The greatest value of transit camp for her was learning about a new model for solving community problems and getting grassroots input.
Yoriko Kishimoto, a Palo Alto councilwoman, also attended and was impressed by a group of attendees who were there with a mission: to get people out of their cars and onto bikes or buses. As she sees it, those are exactly the people who should be involved in transit. Only 3 percent of Santa Clara County residents use the transit system to commute. More, however, might hop on buses if they could know precisely when the bus was going to arrive, and how many minutes they have before racing to the next bus or train.
The solution to standardizing the system map proved elusive. Although computer "geeks" could create user-friendly formats for transit schedules, they would need transit schedule information. And therein lies the rub. Transit agencies are hesitant to release that information, fearing outsiders will do something "radical" with the data.
When Peeples came back from transit camp, he asked the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit staff to do a report on whether it's possible to push the schedule information safely outside the agency. The staff had several serious concerns. Still, Peeples wants to hear "formally and officially" from the chief technology officer whether the transit agency might take the necessary steps to make major schedule improvements available for the site the tech whizzes might create.
The report likely will take six weeks, and Peeples understands that public agencies have to think things through. "When you run 22-ton vehicles up and down streets every day," he says, "you want to be pretty careful how you do things."
But he's also hoping that what he learned at transit camp was not for naught and that those technology wizards working with the public sector can give the Bay Area's transit systems a rider-friendly boost.
Fourth of five parts: 1 2 3 4 5 Single Page