Kieran Huggins announced the MyTTC project today. This is the public release of 2 guys that met at TransitCamp back in February 2007, and have continued to collaborate to provide open tools to transit information for residents of Toronto.

MyTTC was born out of a desire for free, open access to transit data. The amount and quality of the data currently available from the TTC is somewhat lacking, with fewer than twenty percent of the stops and stop-times available. We hope, with your help, to change that for the better.

We are not the TTC, nor are we affiliated, endorsed, or otherwise associated with them. This is a community effort to make using the TTC a better experience for everyone. We hope you’ll join us!

The MyTTC guys have done a wild job working on visualizing transit using estimated stop departure times. "each burst represents a bus departing from the stop in that location. Generated fresh every week with our current data set using Brandon Martin-Anderson’s GTFS Processing algorithm.” It is assumed that this is based on the timetable information for each transit route, and not real-time GPS or other data of the actual vehicles.


TTC Weekday Service (small) from Kieran Huggins on Vimeo.

Mark Kuznicki has continued to evolve the participant-driven tools for enabling a community around transit. His efforts are part of the Metronauts series of events and community site. Metronauts is sponsored by Metrolinx as a bottom-up component in their public consultation process to improve transit in the Greater Toronto Area.

metronauts

Mark has taken the lead on applying the participatory tools and online community tools in their application to citizenship and public policy.

What I am most amazed and pleased by is how this project has brought together some of the leading thinkers and practitioners in open and participatory research, media, policy, innovation, technology and culture into an agile team

By placing the power in the hands of the people to affect change in their world, Mark’s efforts remind me of the radical shift called for in Emergent Democracy [PDF] by Joi Ito (more on Extreme Democracy). It’s a shift from "representative democracy to direct democracy” where citizens are given the tools to participate in decisions and shape policy.  I am curious at the results meet the expectations of both the participants and of Metrolinx. Just fantastic work by Kieran, Kevin and Mark. 

How are you using participant-driven tools to change your community?