Opening Transit Data with Meetup Groups

by Nathan

At a recent Meetup of the Open NY Forum, Sarah Kaufman from New York City Transit (the subway part of the MTA) had some good things to say about Meetup groups. Kaufman posts to the @NYCTSubwayScoop Twitter feed and works with third-party developers to help them build applications that use open transit data, so I was eager to find out more about how local groups are helping the MTA build a successful platform.

Kaufman says that the groups formed themselves around transit and technology without any prodding from the transit authority, that they "created a pre-existing base of people with good ideas."

And most impressively, a Meetup group was a big part of last year's decision to open up MTA data for external developers:

The Open Transit Data Meetup helped us at the MTA hone our needs and goals in terms of data releases. They showed us that there was a community willing to share constructive suggestions, which was perhaps the most important factor in releasing our data. Once some of us got excited about these possibilities, many of our data developers got on board right away, and the excitement has been contagious throughout the agency.

The members even provided the agency with technical support, and encouraged them to adopt an iterative process for releasing data instead of trying to accomplish the monumental task all at once.

In May the MTA hosted an Unconference for Developers when "it became clear that a large group discussion should occur". Meetup groups played an important part here as well, "Dawn Barber of the NY Tech Meetup was instrumental in helping us work out the goals and format of the event."

As their platform evolves, having a community that knows each other offline as well as online is proving to be a big help in prioritizing features like the recent release of station entrance locations: "Had we not met these developers, the data set might not have been as highly prioritized." Kaufman says that whenever she gets together with developers, "there's an unplanned brainstorming session," and the agency is hosting a special session on July 14 to learn from developers that have used different data formats that are under consideration.

This all sounds great, but I had to wonder if an organization as large as the MTA would clash structurally and culturally with self-organized Meetup groups. Not at all, says Kaufman, the nature of working with open data "is transparency and collaboration, and the MTA sees that need regardless of its internal structure." People working to advance their goals in collaboration with government agencies is a "win-win", and "leads to constructive solutions, and in our experience, the outcome — the relationships, the apps, and the dialogue — has been better than we imagined going in."

Who would have thought that a scrappy band of developers could move an institution like New York's transit authority? Hats off to the organizers, members, and employees that are making it happen!

Nathan is Meetup's API/Platform Engineer.

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