Geovation funding for FixMyTransport

FixMyTransport...anywhere

On Wednesday this week, mySociety’s Tom and Paul were in Southampton, competing in the Geovation finals.

Geovation is an initiative coordinated by Ordnance Survey which gives out funding to projects that help “communities address their unmet needs through the application of geographic data, skills and expertise”. When we discovered that the theme this time was “How can we improve transport in Britain?” we knew we had to enter.

As many of you will know, mySociety has been working for some time on FixMyTransport, a project for reporting problems with public transport. Taking much of what we’ve learned from FixMyStreet, we are, in the trademark mySociety way, building a website that will make the process easy, whilst hiding all the complexities out of sight.

FixMyTransport is well under way, and we’re hoping to launch shortly. But with Geovation funding, we hoped to be able to roll out an accompanying mobile application.

This is incredibly important because, after all, the best time to make a transport report is immediately you experience the problem.

mySociety has, of course, always been into maps and geodata – we use them in what we hope are fun and innovative ways across many of our sites, including (obviously) Mapumental, and (less obviously) TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem. We’re also rather fond of public transport.

We also really enjoyed meeting the other contestants, particularly Cyclestreets whose project looks like it will be one to watch.

At the end of the day, we were delighted to learn that we had been awarded £27,000 to develop a simple, intuitive, cross-platform mobile application for FixMyTransport. We can’t wait to get started. We really believe it’s going to be of real benefit to public transport users across the UK (and possibly further, given the open-source nature of all our work).

If you’d like to stay up to date with FixMyTransport as we build and launch it, you might want to be one of the very first to “like” our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter.

9 Comments

  1. I really hope that “cross-platform mobile application” also includes mobile web.
    Not everyone has a phone that can run applications – but almost everyone has a phone which can show web pages.

    Happy to help if you need it 🙂

  2. Yeah, we’re planning this as a web tool primarily – applications within the markets will probably just be format specific views of the web version(s).

  3. Thanks John! We’ll definitely be recruiting beta testers at some point and will be very glad to use your services.

  4. Nice work Tom and Paul – will it be co-launched with the main site, or a later addition?

  5. Have you checked out “Tram Tracker” in use with Melbourne’s tram system. Gives real time information on tram arrivals using the listed pole number at the tram stop. Well used and pretty good!

  6. Hi Dave,
    Thanks for pointing us towards that – am now wondering if we can incorporate a cute puppy in othe FMT interface.

    Tom L, the main site is set to launch in a couple of months, and the app will be launched subsequently.

  7. Mrs,Josephine Hyde-Hartley

    Even better than a cute puppy in my view would be a service that incorporates real live citizens in a way that fully respects our rights to privacy, dignity and autonomy et al. For example in my opinion- which may or may not be enormously important – we should be concerned to fix things so those of us with busy private lives can get more involved here without our being required to actually work for the set up. In this day and age it can’t be right or fair that free citizens are still apparently required to attend to unnecessary and inappropriate automated electronic communications for the purposes of some fallacious and affected log-in routine.