Saturday, 17 October 2026
@vkrause:kde.orgI spent last week in Bern, Switzerland, for the second edition of the Open Transport Community Conference, attending that but also being part of the organizer team.
Open Transport Community Conference
Compared to last year the event has grown quite a bit. The event got merged with the OTP Summit, a yearly event by the OpenTripPlanner community with a lot of overlap in topics.
Besides the two unconference days there now also were two less structured “hack days”. Due to venue constraints those had to happen before the unconference part, which worked for the larger project teams that already knew each other and had prepared agendas, but would probably have been better the other way around for new people not knowing anyone yet.
A lot of work had also gone into moving the event under the umbrealla of the FOSSGIS e.V.. That enabled us to handle sponsors and (optional) paid tickets this year, to cover lunch for all days. And it hopefully put the event on a sustainable base for years to come.
There were about 140 people attending at the peak, from all over Europe as well as a few people from North America. German speakers were still over-represented, while e.g. the French community was clearly under-represented. We had a good mix of people representing different roles and stakeholders though, covering transport operators, public agencies, standardization, research, politics, FOSS and Open Data projects, etc.
I’m very happy we managed to find an organization to host the event again with SBB and opentransportdata.swiss. Hopefully we can continue this, and keep rotating between different countries, to give more people a chance to attend.
Hack Days
So much for the organizer perspective, now to the content. During the hack days I mainly discussed Transitous and KDE Itinerary topics:
- Meta stations in Transitous, ie. what happens when you search for a journey from Paris to London. The expectations there is usually not an exact route between city center points, but between appropriate major transport hubs such as major railway stations or airports. Large cities can have more than one of those though, which means all of those should be considered (ie. treating those as one “meta station”). It’s however non-trivial to define exactly what the expected outcome is here, and we went through many different approaches for which we found unfixable counter-examples. There’s two possible approaches left now that could work generically and mode-independent, those would need to be implemented for more wider testing.
- Geocoding issues in Itinerary, ie. searching for locations resulting in unexpected or confusing results. Jonah improved result merging for this, and we found some issues with parsing Photon responses that added misleading results.
- Decoding Spanish and Norwegian train ticket barcodes. Updates to the Train Ticket Wiki and the Train Ticket Kaitai Spec repository are under way.
- Implementing the MOTIS journey refresh API for KPublicTransport. Turned out the partial results we were seeing there were due to not setting all required parameters correctly.
There’s of course many more things that other people worked on, see for example the notes in the Transitous wiki. Transitous now also covering the Chinese railway system is another significant outcome.
Máté showed an experimental iOS port of Itinerary. The amount of code changes needed for that throughout the stack looked manageable from what I saw, and the first patches to KDE Frameworks are already being upstreamed now. The big challenge for bringing that to production is the building, packaging and delivery part though.
Unconference
Session planning for the unconference part went a lot smoother this time, despite having fewer rooms for parallel sessions. The selected topics seemed even broader than last year.
- Evolving data standard like GTFS, GTFS-Flex, NeTEx and SIRI. I’m particularly excited seeing the community getting more and more actively involved in shaping these.
- Deckplan data. This is very relevant for wheelchair accessibility but also when traveling with bikes or a stroller. Also nice to see that the standardization work there isn’t limited to trains but contains anything from a simple bus to a larger ferry.
- Opened Data. Somehow this term stuck, referring to all kinds of legal, technical or political approaches to obtain data that isn’t voluntarily Open Data.
- Crowd-sourcing data. When data cannot be obtained or isn’t available, people are increasingly looking for ways to fill those gaps themselves, with increasing scope and creativity.
- Ticket standards. A somewhat niche topic, but an amazing examples of how the entire domain got infiltrated and taken over by the community, from reverse engineering a few years ago to now working on the next generation EU ticket standard with an official mandate. We need more of this.
- Dynamic traffic data. This has already been a hot topic at OSM events recently, with various bits of ongoing work presented here.
- C-ITS was also a prominent topic in this context, but also for e.g. priorizing public transport at traffic lights and the additional security implications that come with it.
- Routing algorithms and journey planners like MOTIS and OpenTripPlanner, as consumers of much of the above.
- Aligning schedule, stop and infrastructure data with OpenStreetMap, as well as upstreaming data to OSM or building OSM QA tooling. This matters as we ultimately route on the OSM data, and for that need to be able to match e.g. realtime elevator data to the right OSM object.
There were also more sessions this time focusing on primarily political aspects rather than technical ones, such as passenger rights and illegal border controls.
We also had a small session about onboarding in the Open Transport community in general and the conference in particular. Open Transport encompasses a lot of different very specialized topics meanwhile, with many of the conversations being very jargon- and abbreviation-heavy, which can be off-putting.
Much of this has grown organically over time from local and fragmented efforts, so it’s not always easy to find who to talk to about a specific topic. We recently added the Open Transport Community Matrix space to make it easier to find the right communication channel, ideally we’d also turn the open-transport.org website into a more general entry point. Help welcome.
Most sessions have notes that can be found in the wiki, next to the lightning talk slides.
Outlook
The event got again very positive feedback, people seemed to enjoy it and consider it useful, as e.g. also Brede’s report indicate. There’s clearly interest and demand for a third edition, but we still need a venue and people doing the work for this. If you happen to have a lead on a venue or want to help out by other means, please get in touch, via the conference Matrix channel or by email.
There’s several options to meet before that as well, a few members of the Transitous team will be at the upcoming OSM Hackweekend in Berlin next week for example, and there’s already work ongoing for organizing the Open Transport presence at 40C3 and FOSDEM 2027.
ngraham
