Open Transport Community Conference 2025

On Friday and Saturday last week I attended the first edition of the Open Transport Community Conference in Vienna, Austria.

How we got here

The idea of doing a dedicated conference for the Open Transport community had been floating around for a while, but at FOSDEM this year it got into the heads of people with connections to a potential venue, the ÖBB Innovation Factory in Vienna.

ÖBB was interested in hosting this, in April we had agreed on a date, and that “we” were responsible for organizing participants and content. Due to a mis-click on a meeting invite, “we” then also included me.

While we had a pretty good idea of what kind of event we would like to attend ourselves, there was limited experience in actually organizing and executing something like this. What could possibly go wrong? (spoiler: turns out, very little)

Goals

As there’s already events covering Open Transport topics, we wanted to fill a specific gap: Lots of space for connecting and exchange. In particular, connecting local activities all over Europe, and connecting different stakeholders and the community.

The program side of this is fairly straightforward: little time for conventional talks (we only had two 30min lightning talk sessions), an unconference program and lots of breaks and room for an extensive hallway track.

Getting a sufficiently diverse set of participants is less easy to control. With the organization team (mainly consisting of people from Germany and Austria) using their network to invite people we started out with a rather German-centric set of signups, but as word spread this improved towards the summer, and would probably have continued that way if we hadn’t run out of tickets two month before the event already.

There’s of course more groups and individuals we would have liked to have there, but overall this worked out nicely I think.

Content

Session topics covered a wide range of topics:

• Schedule data, realtime vehicle position and delay data, transport stop data, train station infrastructure data, vehicle and ride sharing data, elevation data and event data.
• Data quality and ways to improve that in collaboration with data producers, or by independent post-processing/augmenting.
• Obtaining data, including various creative or more forceful approaches.
• Historical data and data archiving, as well as analytics and research based on that.
• Standardization efforts and data formats.
• Political and regulatory efforts.
• Routing and geocoding.
• Ticket barcode formats.
• User needs and UX design around travel (planning) applications.

The conference wiki has links to the collaborative session note pads, those will be persisted into the wiki together with other material (as far as people send that to us) in the comings days.

See also the reports from Brede and VRN.

Transitous

Besides a dedicated Q&A session around Transitous, there was plenty of exchange with applications using Transitous like Bimba and Träwelling, as well as the MOTIS team and other MOTIS users.

This resulted for example in an GTFS extension proposal for providing operator, route type and line icons as part of schedule data. This would allow sharing work several clients are currently doing each on their own.

There was also a dedicated session on collaboration on GBFS feed collection and aggregation, which is currently somewhat duplicated between the Mobility Database, Citybikes and Transitous. There is interest by all parties to consolidate this, particularly interesting for Transitous here is ingesting the non-GBFS data that Citybikes can read and converts to GBFS.

Very exciting for me was seeing what people are building around and on top Transitous, going way beyond what we had originally anticipated, such as building tools also for the data producer side.

I was particularly impressed by the efforts by the Slovenian community to provide completed and quality-enhanced public transport data feeds beyond the bare-minimum or non-existent official data, and there seemed to be interest by communities in other regions to reuse some of those tools and approaches.

KDE Itinerary

Itinerary got a few positive mentions from participants who had (successfully) used it on their trips to Vienna, as well as a few fixes for better handling of some combinations of ÖBB tickets and the ÖBB RailJet onboard API.

While most sessions covered things Itinerary is built on top of, from schedule data to decoding ticket barcodes, the user needs and user interfaces session was probably the most directly applicable one to Itinerary.

That confirmed the need for applications supporting specific use-case such as assisting during an ongoing (longer) trip or during commuting, beyond the (of course also needed) general-purpose journey planners. Itinerary covers the former, KTrip the latter. Ideas for a “KDE Commute” counter-part exist since years, but this moved a bit out of focus for me with the rise of home office work since the COVID pandemic.

Either way, plenty of ideas for what could be done to make travel applications even more useful.

Next year?

All feedback we got so far indicated interest in doing this again next year. For this to happen we need a few things:

• A venue. Given there is no budget (see next point), that practically has to come for free, hosting 150-200 people, and ideally also ways to feed those.
• An umbrella organization we can attach the event to, ie. a legal entity that can sign contracts, handle money and own things (like accounts/domains). Having individuals of the organization team do this on their own isn’t really sustainable.
• And most importantly: volunteers to actually do the work and organize this. Most people on the current team aren’t particularly keen on organizing events, we just really wanted to have such an event. So in order to keep this going sharing the load in the community is crucial.

There’s also ongoing discussions on combining or co-locating with similar events, such as the OpenTripPlanner Summit, which would potentially further increase the number of participants and might extend the event to more days.

If you are interested, join the Open Transport Community Conference Matrix channel!