The first Auckland Transport ‘hackathon’ has been a success
Auckland’s first civic hackathon HACKAKL:Transport was a great success with 340 people taking part.
Designers, developers and innovators came together for a weekend of hacking for good supported by Auckland Transport in conjunction with AUT University and software house Propellerhead.
The weekend brought together bright minds who are interested in utilising open government data to develop fresh ideas that will help improve Auckland.
In the run-up to the event, Auckland Transport made available a beta application programming interface (API) that opened up a wide range of the organisation’s data, including real-time bus information, geo-coding, roading and congestion data.
The My AT 2.0 team of Eddie Chae, Kyungmo Kang, Donghan Kim and Jingun Lee developed a working example for most features including one which lets customers save a selection of multiple favourite destinations and or trips; it can also compare the journey time and cost between public transport and a private vehicle.
The team’s application also shows you the estimated time to upcoming stops and it lets the customer give feedback on their public transport trip.
Auckland Transport General Manager Business Technology Roger Jones says the MY AT 2.0 team also came up with a customised app to allow payments on-the-go for public transport.
“This is exactly the sort of thing we were hoping for. Great ideas which could be useful for everyone who uses public transport, we will now be working with the team to develop these concepts to a fully functioning product.”
Some other ideas from the event include an application letting parents track their children on public transport, another that analyses data against public transport routes and times to determine the impact on low social economic areas.
My AT 2.0 won the Fujitsu Most Popular Award and a tablet, donated by HP, for each team member.