By Mike Mathieu on February 15th, 2010
Estonia Cleanup – citizen self-organized 1-day cleanup of an entire country
Localocracy beta site launch – engagement in local elections and issues
Federal Ideascale Dashboard- aggregates, compares levels of public idea generation at different federal agencies.
ChatRoulette – randomized video chat connection between people across the world. Mindchanging. Contemplating potential impact on civic engagement. [WARNING: not always work or kid safe - in the same way that many AOL chats 12 years ago weren't all work or kid safe.]
By Mike Mathieu on February 8th, 2010
By Mike Mathieu on February 5th, 2010
Fun Facts from a remarkable year:
- 10 million visitors spent 46 million minutes on Walk Score in the last year.
- Daily traffic is up 291% since last January.
- 1.3 million visits last month.
- 46% of visitors are in the process of deciding where to live.
- 11,000 petition signatures to increase America’s Walk Score.
- 1,6oo signed petitions asking local transit agencies to open their GTFS data feed to sites like Walk Score.
- 3,400 real estate web sites now use Walk Score Real Estate services, up 484% in 1 year.
2009 Product highlights:
- Launched the Walk Score API – now serving 3 million scores/day to our real estate partners
- Shipped our first Walk Score iPhone app with the help of some great volunteers.
- Added public transit locations on Walk Score – our #1 customer request
- Upgraded the Walk Score Tile (Walk Score in a widget) to include Google Street View and transit maps
- Received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for transit and other improvements
- Compare Your Score – lets you see how you’re doing compared to others in your town
- Walk Score Home Value Study – Joe Cortwright, economist for CEOs for Cities quantifies the financial value of a high Walk Score
Thanks to all of our supporters for your help. We look forward to a more walkable 2010.
By Mike Mathieu on February 4th, 2010
This week I’ve looked at Twitter searches on “transit” revealing a rich cross-section of tweets ranging from rider rants, to stories of riders pushing back against agencies, to cases of agencies opening up to their ridership. I think riders holding transit agencies accountable for their service delivery promises could be the start of a transformational culture shift within the transit community. Here are some examples:
Rants
@RatedRHackstar wrote: Nj transit has to have to worse buses, timewise eva, them sits neva stick to schedule they come when they want
@merlynn wrote: the bus in front of me averaged a whopping 40 mph on the freeway. Way to go, Sound Transit.
@BlackMaria wrote: They’re checking fare on transit. Like half the people on the bus got fined and kicked off. Mean!!
@BookGeekGal wrote: Indianapolis: Why does your public transit website SUCK & repeatedly crash my internet? I’m trying to study feasibility of Indy trip. #sigh
@mermaidmask wrote: I f***ing hate public transit!
Tech Driving Accountability
@MicheleNW wrote: Lol bus went past me then stopped. I got on and he says “I know you would’ve emailed NJ transit…” I said “before you hit the corner!”
@coffee_makers wrote: TTC driver suspended following YouTube video of coffee break: A Toronto transit driver has been suspended pending … http://bit.ly/dChgsS
Agencies Opening Up for Feedback
@gctransit wrote: Welcome to the Gwinnett County Transit Facebook page. In our efforts to provide better service to our customers we… http://bit.ly/9KqOl0
@HillsboroughMPO wrote: How could improved mass transit in Tampa Bay affect you? Video contest going on now http://tinyurl.com/y9g4k7g
By Mike Mathieu on February 1st, 2010
Transit agencies are on the move — opening up their GTFS transit feeds at a record pace. Through January, 107 transit agencies now provide open data — up 41% since the December launch of City-Go-Round, a nifty little site that promotes the virtues of open transit data and highlights the cool apps that civic-minded software developers have built using those data feeds.
While we love up-and-right pointing graphs, more than 650 other transit agencies are lacking open data, and we hope to see that change in 2010.
City-Go-Round contains a list, (lovingly called The Wall of Shame here at the office), of the 10 largest transit agencies without open data.
Amazingly, just since our launch, 4 of the original Top 10 agencies have gone Open Data, and of the 4 new ones that took their place, half of those opened up too. This leaves us with a new top 10 as we head into February:
By Mike Mathieu on January 28th, 2010
This report(PDF) from the Wilburforce Foundation and the Brainerd Foundation, does a good job highlighting standard best practices for online engagement, and does it through the compelling lens of seeing the positive impact in a political campaign. Here are some key ideas that we’ll be taking to heart here at Front Seat:
- Hire great people with professional experience. (We just started recruiting for a new Marketing Manager.)
- Always be testing. (We’ve integrated Google Analytics, but we’re not yet in an analytic-driven, continuous testing mind set.)
- Get signups first. You can get revenue later. (Sign up here!)
- Make sure that all of your emails have a consistent narrative arc.
- Email frequency can go up around specific, time-critical events, without losing your readers
I got more inspiration from the report than just these bullets, but you’ll have to wait to see how our sites change to find out!
