Cite Open311

opendata · Jul 29, 2016 · c0ad74b · c0ad74b
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@@ -54,7 +54,7 @@ This approach has yielded exactly zero standards in this space.
 
 General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) is the huge success story here, and that resulted from [some Google engineers working with a single transit agency](http://www.transitwiki.org/TransitWiki/index.php?title=General_Transit_Feed_Specification#Origins_.26_history). There was no series of roundtables, no acceptance testing, no RFC. They just did it, building something lightweight and extensible that solved the problems at hand. It’s changed a lot in the 11 years since, adapting to the needs of its growing user base and becoming subject to the normal standards-creation processes, but for almost that entire time, GTFS has been _the_ standard for transit data.
 
-We don’t have enough data points to know whether GTFS is an outlier or a model, but I posit that it’s a model. At the moment, there’s no movement to create schemas for the many dozens of core datasets that are being published by governments (or, rather, not being published). The effort required to convene a standards group is apparently not worth the trouble, what with it not happening. The effort required to do this for _all_ of these core datasets is implausibly large. So let’s not.
+We don’t have enough data points to know whether GTFS is an outlier or a model, but I posit that it’s a model. (Consider that [Open311 emerged in the same way](http://www.open311.org/2010/02/san-francisco-and-dc-set-to-launch-open311-apis/).) There’s no movement to create schemas for the many dozens of core datasets that are being published by governments (or, rather, not being published). The effort required to convene a standards group is apparently not worth the trouble, what with it not happening. The effort required to do this for all of these core datasets is implausibly large. So let’s not.
 
 What we need is for tiny groups of stakeholders—maybe mere pairings of stakeholders—to _just go ahead and create standards within their area of expertise._ And don’t call it a “standard,” if they don’t want to. Call it an “implementation” or “our schema,” or whatever.