Folks at the Green Wheels meeting said that I should post a blog post after I told them about Transit Camp, a two-day event in Palo Alto, CA that brought people to talk about and work on innovations to make transit easier, better, and more popular, largely using the web, but also off of the web to.

What was cool about Transit Camp? In a word, everything, but more specifically:

The format

The first day's sessions were set by organizers beforehand, with many guest presentations, but audience participation and ad-hoc breakout sessions were strongly encouraged. The second day's sessions were set at the end of the first day by laying out stickies on a grid (see the photo I did not take, but stole from fotogail on flickr, right). Behind all this was only one rule:

TransitCampBayArea is not a complaints department, it is a SOLUTIONS PLAYGROUND. This means that we really want to use the two days we have for this to come up with creative, simple solutions to some of the issues. We realize that not all issues will be addressed during TransitCampBayArea, but that's okay. We want to start a positive conversation that moves forward to creating cool partnerships between transit officials and geeks. Hopefully, this will be the first of many of these. By attending TransitCampBayArea, you agree to follow this rule. People who break this rule will be asked to come up with solutions...if they cannot, they may be asked to leave so that the rest of us can. (from the Transit Camp Bay Area Wiki)

This rule was posted on the walls at the camp, announced at the beginning of each day, and posted on the Transit Camp website. The rule worked well, and I was inspired to declare something similar for Green Wheels meetings on our website.

The people

On of the parts of Transit Camp that made it so rich was the diversity of different people there. There were:

• Public transit board member
• Elected officials
• Transit agency staff, some attending with official santioning and others as renegades interested in what was going on
• Consultants
• Commercial software vendors and developers
• Transit activists
• Riders
• Geeks at-large

Most (like me) fell into more than one category. Some of the folks I met were Logan Green, developer of the Zimride/Carpool app for Facebook, which I reported on in an earlier issue of the Community Wheel, and who is a friend-of-a-friend I had been corresponding with but never met, Joe Hughes, with Google Transit, and Bryce Nesbit, with City Carshare, among other things.

There were too many interesting people there to list here. It was exciting to be around so many like-minded folks.

The discussions, ideas, and presentations

I came away from Transit Camp feeling that transit information on the web is going to become much richer, and easier to use, and it's going to happen quickly, and there's little that any one can do about it. Agencies that are proactive about it will incur public favor and lead, but others won't be so forward-thinking. Other changes outside of transit information will help. Here's some of what was discussed.

• Google Transit - it's hard to underestimate the impact of Google Transit on the world in terms of modeling the shape of things to come, and making a giant leap for openness in transit information. There has never been as much transit schedule information in one format as is currently documented in the Google Transit Feed Specification, and other tools, software, and websites (both proprietary and open source) are starting to read and do things with the specification (like the web-application I built). Look for more travel information specifications to to come.
• TripML - a trip markup language. There were a large number of folks very interested in online rideshare matching, including Logan with Zimride, someone from Ridespring, and gotalift.com, among others. Participants started creating a trip description specification (like GTFS) to exchange carpool and other data. We also talked about a query language, so that we can move toward some sort of priceline.com for all travel modes.
• Openness in customer information and service - I thought getsatisfaction.com was really cool, and have encouraged Humboldt Transit Authority to get started and take advantage of it. It operates on a principle I have long believed in and worked to support with Humscape.com's Feedback Loop, though getsatiscation is more holistic and innovative.
• Non-tech ideas: How about transit passes that allow you to bring a buddy on board on weekends? It provides more value out of your pass, with the benefit of facilitating new people being introduced to the transit system.