Those who hadn't memorized Metro's schedules had to employ its persnickety Trip Planner, a clunky Web form that not only won't let you click on a map to specify your location but also chokes on cities, states, Zip codes and even commas if you add them to a street address. Meanwhile, other U.S. cities had enjoyed transit directions from sites like Google Maps since at least 2005. But not DC.

Worse yet, after the first step to share schedules, converting data to the standard General Transit Feed Specification format, Metro had halted the effort. In December 2008, a spokesman told the urban-development blog Greater Greater Washington that continuing it was "not in our best interest from a business perspective." That left Metro riders with kludgey, screen-scraping workarounds like DCist's text-messaging service.

But now, Metro rail and bus directions are clicks or taps away in third-party sites and applications, allowing passengers to benefit from such innovations as Google's stop-by-stop transit navigation on Android phones. The changes in between suggest a road map for other organizations having their own open-data debates.

Start lobbying to open a conversation. Greater Greater Washington editor David Alpert quickly had hundreds of signatures on a petition protesting the decision. That persuaded Metro to detail its objections: fear of losing $68,000 in yearly ad revenue from the Trip Planner page, a wish to be paid for its data, and the legalese around data sharing. That then widened the discussion from an argument over APIs to one over the proper use of taxpayer dollars.

"David came along and started this campaign," said Christopher Zimmerman, an Arlington County Board member who chaired Metro's board in 2008. "It wouldn't have happened without the public pressure." Alpert could also lobby Metro from closer in after joining its Riders' Advisory Council in January of 2009.

Flipping the debate from potential profits to actual expenses. Gordon Linton, a former head of the Federal Transit Administration who served alongside Zimmerman on the Metro board, focused on the opportunity cost of giving data to other sites. He said the agency had given away resources - for example, free parking for car-sharing services - that it later realized could yield income.

"While we were raising fares and cutting service if we were investing staff time and energy for a product that would reap some financial benefit for those who would use it and sell it, then we in turn should get some money back," Linton said.

Zimmerman took the opposite argument: the ease of upgrading one aspect of the Metro experience. "We were having a lot of difficulties," he said. "If some of these things don't cost us anything or don't cost us a lot [to fix], we should do them right away."

Alpert suggested this debate encouraged Metro staffers to rethink things. "Staff may have felt they were under orders from the board to maximize revenue. Zimmerman gave them permission not to worry about that."

Oh, and Google never had any interest in paying for a schedule feed. Wrote spokeswoman Anne Espiritu: "We do not pay agencies for their data."

A change in leadership can help. All of this effort got sidetracked on June 22, 2009 when two Red Line trains collided and killed nine passengers. Things were set back further when general manager John Catoe unexpectedly resigned in early 2010 and his interim replacement Richard Sarles had to focus on safety upgrades.

But Sarles' earlier employer, NJ Transit, had provided rail schedules to Google back in 2008. He wanted to follow suit here, said Metro spokesman Dan Stessel.

Metro and Google signed a data-sharing agreement in July of 2010, once Google had dropped earlier demands for an indemnification clause. Metro directions showed up on Microsoft's Bing Maps in September 2010; they arrived on Google in May after a final shove from Sarles following his appointment as WMATA's full-time general manager in January.

(But even now, you must return to Metro's sites or a few third-party apps for bus and train arrival predictions. Google only announced a standard format for that data, GTFS-realtime, in August, and Metro is still weighing support for that. And some regional bus systems that Metro's Trip Planner includes have yet to provide their own GTFS data to mapping sites.)

What about the original financial arguments? We may never know how the math worked out: without detailed surveys, you can't draw a line from clicking on maps to boarding trains. But Stessel, who didn't provide a dollar cost for the work involved, suggested that the rationale merchants invoke to invest in intangibles like store or site designs works for public transit too: "Our primary motivation is improving the customer experience." Zimmerman had a more philosophical justification for how a government agency should act: "Putting information in the public domain is part of what we do."

Sometimes, being open isn't easy. You could say that there were many stops on the route that Metro took.

Spend your own money to travel to Florida during its least pleasant season, bum a ride to a rented house split with strangers, and wake up on a couch before dawn multiple days in a row. That's no vacation - unless NASA requests your company.

The space agency invited a selection of its Twitter followers to the last five shuttle launches, including the July 8 liftoff of Atlantis, the last of the shuttle program. (I attended the Tweetup held in April and May for the final launch of Endeavour, then returned this month with a press pass.) Some 700 people have now traveled to its launch Tweetups, while hundreds more have attended shorter gatherings at its centers.

NASA first regarded Tweetups as an experiment, but they've become a key part of how it tells its story.

If NASA makes Tweetups look easy, that's only because of mid-course corrections in response to lessons learned. Anybody planning for one of these Take Your Fans To Work Days would do well to pay attention - especially if they don't have a spaceship to launch for the occasion.

1. Talk to people before you invite them into your house. By the time NASA invited followers to visit its Jet Propulsion Laboratory in January of 2009, it had not only established an active Twitter presence, it had set up blogs for many of its personnel and even some of its spacecraft. Tweeps knew they could expect a conversation, not a lecture.

2. Prepare for a crowd. "I was shocked people would fly across the country for a 2-hr event at NASA Headquarters," emailed Stephanie Schierholz, the agency's social-media manager. Its first-come-first-served approach for its initial shuttle-launch Tweetup in late 2009 had to be replaced by a random drawing (after screening out inert or abusive users) as the number of people applying soared, exceeding 4,100 for Endeavour's last launch and 5,500 for Atlantis's finale.
   But NASA also sets aside guest spots - a good way to bring in people with oversized audiences and to reward fans who contribute extensively to its online community, if fodder for rare resentment over who gets this special nod. Compulsive tech blogger Robert Scoble made the cut in July this way; so did San Antonio Web designer Shannon Moore, who went to the first launch Tweetup and earned a sort of den-mother status by constantly sharing and curating other attendees' tips and recaps.

3. The conversation will go on and on. At both launches I witnessed, NASA's program - talks by astronauts, managers and researchers; visits to the 526-foot-high Vehicle Assembly Building and Pad 39A the day before launch; the exhilarating sight and sound of liftoff itself - fed into thousands of tweets. But the chatter spilled into private Facebook groups, Flickr albums, Google+ updates, Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins and such specialized applications as Storify, Scoop.it, and Beluga, making these Tweetups a generalized social-media hothouse. Among Schierholz's suggestions to those considering hosting a Tweetup: "You have to ensure you don't have any restrictions on what they can tweet or share (whether because of lack of bandwidth or because you don't want a picture getting out)."

4. A small, focused online community expands people's trust. By the third launch Tweetup, travelers opted to share vacation homes instead of pricey hotel rooms near KSC - trusting that strangers would PayPal their share in advance. They did. And after a series of mechanical problems delayed Discovery's final flight for 111 days, attendees had grown comfortable with a gift-economy approach to travel; Danielle Signor recalled that she "basically relied on others to get me to and from the airport."
   None of the four attendees of that Tweetup I reached recalled any hangups worse than minor personality conflicts. I had zero issues in the rented homes I crashed at during April and July (nicknamed "Skylab House" and "Serenity House," in honor of NASA history and science fiction). In July, I didn't even rent a car, trusting that the Tweetup hive mind would cover that if I paid for gas, tolls and an occasional meal. It did.

5. People will find ways to extend the experience. A launch Tweetup promotes the same sort of accelerated socialization as the first week of freshman year in college, so I was not surprised to see people organize a packed party a day after Atlantis's launch - "Endless BBQ" - that featured two kegs but also webcams streaming the festivities and a telescope parked in the driveway. Another independently organized gathering happened the day afterwards: a trip to Port Canaveral to watch one of Atlantis's solid rocket boosters get towed in. And it's assured that when a NASA 747 ferries Discovery to the Air and Space Museum's Dulles International Airport annex in 2012, space Tweeps will gather there for her arrival.
   ]]> http://readwrite.com/2011/07/20/-spend-your-own-money http://readwrite.com/2011/07/20/-spend-your-own-money Features Wed, 20 Jul 2011 06:05:55 -0700 Rob Pegoraro