The 2023 MobilityData North American Workshop: Highlights from Day Two
Day two of the MobilityData North American Workshop started with an engaging Community Pitch session, where participants were able to share their current projects and initiatives. We had over 15 participants. Following this, we headed straight into session one to get to work!
Session 1.A: Assessing the Landscape: Understanding the Current State of Data Quality Collaboration
During this interactive session, participants had the opportunity to learn more about how transit authorities, regulators, and data consumers worked together to enhance and define data quality. Together, they identified the significant challenges associated with data quality and brainstormed innovative approaches to foster greater collaboration throughout the industry. Specifically, participants identified key ways to improve collaboration around GTFS data quality
In this session, the proposed solutions included:
- Usability changes to the validator to include more visualizations of issues and human-readable language
- Creating a system to flag which files/fields are consumed by different journey planners or required by regulators
- Custom profiles to see region-specific or journey-planning rules
- Greater investment in improving the GTFS real-time validator
Session 1.B: Everyone is Welcome Here: Making GBFS Governance Open to All
In this session, we sought to clarify the GBFS Governance process and the way it is presented to the community so that we could make it as clear as possible and welcoming to all. There were two parts of this session. Firstly, we discussed and decided what kind of amendments we wanted to suggest. Following this, we ensured that the governance process was accessible to everyone. A major takeaway was a need for a more consistent and predictable release schedule which would be beneficial for the community.
During lunch, we had another fireside chat led by Gretchen Newcomb and Taylor D. Reich from ITDP. The discussion was centered around how GTFS is used to mitigate GHGs in the transport sector, with the sharing of use cases outside the U.S. We also discussed how the NTD required migration to GTFS, as well as BTS’s partnership with MobilityData will strengthen the impact of GTFS.
Session 2: Choose Your Own Adventure
We allowed participants to choose the topics covered in session two. Following the votes, MobilityData’s team led the discussion of the most popular themes chosen!
Attendees shared their vision for exciting emerging data standards in the transportation space and were enthusiastic about the prospect of MobilityData playing a stewardship role for additional standards. We shared aspects of our strategy to explain how the organization might decide about future growth. These include a four-part mission test to keep the organization focused on international traveler-focused open standards, the organization’s core competencies, and the business model.
And that’s a wrap for our MobilityData Workshops for 2023! Stay tuned for some more blog posts about various themes that arose during our Workshops, and stay connected for upcoming events.
