WikiConference India 2011/Submissions/wikitransit

Timestamp

13:46, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Title of the submission

Wikitransit

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, or presentation)

Chinmay Agarwal

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences)

chinmay.iitd@gmail.com

State of your origin (Country, if you are not based in India)

Uttar Pradesh

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

IIT Delhi alumni

Personal homepage or blog

Abstract (maximum 500 words)

Public transport is poorly developed in India. However in big cities where it exists the routes of buses are not easily accessible to commuters. Smart phones are slowly becoming a part of life now. So are the 'apps'. Developers are actively making (offline) applications for accessing public transport in different cities of world. In the case of India, it is difficult to acquire public transport information for a individual developer. It is even difficult for a company like google to acquire this information. However, since google is a private company the concern of authorities may be considered a bit justifiable. Also, google is more interested in promoting its own android phones so if the information is with google it won't help everyone. Also google's love of putting things only in 'online' form and integrating with google maps has its own disadvantages.

I call for the development of a open source database of public transport information. Taking help from activists, filing RTI queries and PILs, one should be able to get this information. The next step would be to deliver this information by using web services and standard offline 'apps' for each of the mobile OS platforms (Android, Symbian, Windows, iOS). This will create a brand which would possibly contain updated transit information of all the cities of world. The good thing will be this database and apps would be open source, something which would be more acceptable while filing PILs to fetch information from govt. authorities.

(I read proposal for 'Wikitransit' a while back but that project has not seen the light of the day yet. However, for the country like India where we are living this makes more sense since it is difficult to get the correct public transport data from authorities. An effort from open source community will help a lot of people and would possibly reduce the number of cars on road )

Track (Community/Knowledge/Outreach/Technology)

Technology or Knowledge (not sure)

Will you attend Wikiconference if your submission is not accepted?

No, I won't come.

Slides or further information (optional)