Open Transport Community Conference 2025 Call for Participation

As hinted here before, in October this year there will be the first dedicated conference for the Open Transport community, and the Call for Participation for that has just been published.

Open Transport Community Conference

In 2024 the Railways and Open Transport track at FOSDEM kick-started Transitous, and it looks like its 2025 edition also got something rolling: A dedicated multi-day conference for the Open Transport community.

Given the interest in that subject at various other events demand for that seems to be high, and following a discussion at FOSDEM an offer for a venue came in a few weeks later.

That sorted the logistical part, leaving us with the task of getting interested people together and come up with content. (And yes, after successfully dodging event organization for many years I misclicked on a meeting invite and am now part of the team organizing this…)

Time and location

The Open Transport Community Conference will happen on October 17th and 18th at ÖBB’s Open Innovation Factory in the middle of Vienna, Austria.

Participation is free, but you have to register.

Who is this for?

We want to create an event that is useful for everyone interested in, contributing to or working on Free Software and Open Data around public transport and shared mobility.

And while I have little doubt that putting people involved with routing engines (MOTIS, OpenTripPlanner, OpenRouteService, etc), applications (GNOME’s Maps and Railways, KDE’s Itinerary and KTrip, Transportr and Öffi, Träwelling, etc) and public transport data and data formats (OSM, MobilityData, transport operators, etc) together in a room for two days will be valuable, a bit more of an agenda probably helps to convince more people of this.

The event will be organized as an Unconference, so somewhere between a conference with pre-planned talks and a Hack Weekend without any pre-defined structure. We felt that the main gap left by very packed events such as FOSDEM is time for people to talk to each other and exchange more in-depth on a subject, so that’s what we are trying to focus on.

We also want to provide a forum for regional Open Transport communities to network and connect. A lot of things are happening locally and somewhat separate from each other, while often facing similar challenges that would benefit from more exchange and collaboration.

Call for Participation

We deviate from a pure Unconference approach a bit by already collecting possible session topics ahead of time. Spontaneous suggestions of course remain possible, but the idea here is to give people a better understanding of what to expect, given we are running this event for the first time.

Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:

• Schedule data, including data formats, data quality, tooling, QA as well as uses and lobby/outreach work for getting more data published.
• Shared and on-demand mobility data.
• Routing for all kinds of modalities, including engines, algorithms and APIs.
• Accessibility in public transport, including routing profiles, indoor routing, data standards and modeling and elevator status data.
• Passenger-facing applications around public transport and mobility usecases.
• Transit data analysis and research supporting passenger-facing usecases.
• Operations of open source public transport routing services.
• Digital tickets beyond proprietary platforms.
• Open source solutions for community-run mobility services.
• Geocoding.
• OpenStreetMap (OSM), including tagging schemas, data importing and upstream collaboration.
• Collaboration between public transport operators/agencies and the Open Transport community.
• Community work, such as local events/meetups.

See the Call for Participation for more information.

See you in Vienna!

Register for the event, propose session topics, join the event Matrix channel and spread the word!