No news is good news?
I seldom take a train but what I read in the papers supports my little experience: you don’t get much for your tax dollars with Sydney’s trains.
If I ran Sydney’s lamentable railway service I would be falling over myself to help commuters. I might hand out plastic seat covers so they could sit with confidence that their trousers weren’t soaking up last night’s vomit; or I might give them free newspapers so they had something to read other than the smutty graffiti encouraged by discounted student travel.
What I would not be doing is paying lawyers to menace iPhone app developers who are doing nothing more sinsister than offering rail timetables in a contemporary form. I wouldn’t be doing it for at least three reasons:
Firstly, I’d probably be very, very busy trying to clean up the trains and get them to be punctual. I wouldn’t have time to be threatening commuters and developers with legal action.
Secondly, I’d probably be too embarrassed to spend even more taxpayer money than I already do, especially on lawyers threatening some of the few supporters I do have.
Thirdly, I’d think to myself: hang on, this will save me a dollar or two on developing my own application (see above point about frittering away taxpayers’ money).
“RailCorp‘s primary concern is that our customers receive accurate, up-to-date timetable information,” a spokeswoman said in a statement.
“This includes details of service interruptions, special event services, trackwork and other changes. Third-party RailCorp timetable applications may contain inaccuracies and have the potential to mislead our customers.” via SMH
This is certainly a sensible argument with which one can’t find fault. After all, on the few occasions I have taken the train I have seen RailCorp staff running around with red pens offering to update commuters’ hard copies and printouts of timetables with details of “service interruptions, special events services, trackwork and other changes.” In fact, RailCorp has disabled the “print version” feature of its online timetable so you can never have anything but an up-to-the-minute electronic version. Hang on, no they haven’t, my mistake. But this is all very sensible nonetheless. Really. Why on earth should the public be able to take public information from a public service and make it available to the public? Christ almighty, next step End Times.
Contrast Railcorp’s thick-headed approach to this issue with the Bureau of Meterology‘s enlighted embrace of Graham Dawson’s OzWeather iPhone app. As Graham told our packed-like-a-5.17-commuter-service seminar Entering the Mobile Ecosystem, BOM simply forks over its data to him, no charge, no drama, no issues.
It’s almost as if BOM thinks to itself, “We’re paid for by the public, maybe the information we generate by spending that money should, you know, belong to the public.” Communists.
Maybe, and here’s some real craziness, RailCorp should be spending its time and money making the trains run on time, not worrying the public might be “misled” if iPhone app developers give them access to the published timetable. Or, and now my brain is really starting to hurt, they help these guys to incorporate up-to-the-minute information into the app because it is, you know, web-enabled so that would be an — argh! the pain, the pain! — a win-win.
If RailCorp wants to ensure timely and accurate data in third-party offerings, they just need to ensure that they *publish* timely and accurate data themselves. And these days, of course, publish would mean in a form accessible via the web, and consequently also instantly available to third parties.
The BoM is very impressive in this regard. IMO their publicly accessible weather data offerings are the best in the world. They ensure timeliness and accuracy in third party offerings simply by imposing the condition that republished data includes issue times and expiry times where appropriate.
Hilarious and absolutely spot on. Now given that the people in charge at RailCorp don’t read blogs (They probably have someone who operates their computer for them), what are the chances of them understanding?
I’m not sure, Tom. RailCorp probably has their lawyers monitoring blogs in case anyone gives out a train time and they need to get it shut down.
Hilarious and great post. Totally agree.
Open data and free access would be beneficial to all parties, but RailCorp’s reaction comes from an old mentality. It was common for companies to protect ideas and secret receipts from competitors. “What if they find out about our new idea? They will steal it!” – that kind of thinking.
Information protection is important today too but in much more cases people already have and are working on same ideas. It is pointless to protect what is known.
It still sounds odd and is counterintuitive for many that sharing ideas and efforts does actually bring in more benefits than keeping ideas to themselves. Open source movement is one example. Another good example is “Goldcorp Challenge” – when a mining company opened all it’s geological data to the world.
Mining industry is a very secretive industry and geological data is carefully guarded resource.
What RailCorp guards here? Timetables?! Yeah… right…
Completely agree and it does seem like very traditional thinking by some people at Railcorp. They should embrace someone willing to work with [for] them, and provide a service for their customers, for free.
You can only assume the person who unleashed the lawyers really didn’t think it through, or consider the benefits, or was aware of something like OzWeather and its BOM integration.
I’m not sure, Tom. RailCorp probably has their lawyers monitoring blogs in case anyone gives out a train time and they need to get it shut down.