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My part of a presentation given with Harper Reed and Jon Trowbridge on April 10, 2009-- "Hacking the CTA"
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Some CTA Hacks2003 - present
Daniel X. O’Neil, April 10, 2009
Background
• 2003: I set up my brother, Kevin O’Neil, with a TypePad account
• He started “KJO’s Catchalls”, where he-- among other things-- wrote about how he wish George Bush wasn’t the President of the United States
Then he launchedCTA Tattler
• Pretty popular
• Lots of readers and comments
• Has a pretty good community
• Started to be an unofficial outlet for info
July 2005
• Bomb scare on the Blue Line
• Lack of effective communication at the station level
• People used CTA Tattler as an avenue for gripes
• But in these gripes was gold
Tons of details-- but wrong place, wrong time
Enter UPOC
• I had worked with a free wireless notification utility at www.upoc.com and thought it might be useful
So I started CTA Alerts
• Rider-to-rider communication in the event of service disruption or emergency on the Chicago Transit Authority.
• The CTA itself immediately got involved-- approved at a CTA Board Meeting days after launch
• For years, they used the system as a quasi-official outlet for information
Some username issues at first
Keys to loosely coupled relationships with government
• Community/ constituency
• No cost to entry
• Responsible, reliable developers
• Lack of contracts or formal responsibilities
• Tone of cooperation-- trust
The relationship has continued
• Through leadership changes
• Ron Huberman, Richard Rodriguez, at the operations level
• Through technology changes
• New Web site, their own alerts, RSS
• Again: loosely coupled
Our own software changes
• UPOC is dumb
• People want to subscribe to specific lines
• Twitter and FaceBook emerge as platforms
• My own lack of skills become more of a pain in the butt
Enter Harper Reed
Pumping UPOC messages and CTA RSS to Twitter
More to come
• More community
• Retweet mechanism
• Not to be morose, but it’s more useful in an emergency