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