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Some CTA Hacks
1. Some CTA Hacks
2003 - present
Daniel X. O’Neil, April 10, 2009
2. Background
• 2003: I set up my brother, Kevin O’Neil,
with a TypePad account
• He started “KJO’s Catchalls”, where he--
among other things-- wrote about how he
wish George Bush wasn’t the President of
the United States
3.
4. Then he launched
CTA Tattler
• Pretty popular
• Lots of readers and comments
• Has a pretty good community
• Started to be an unofficial outlet for info
5.
6. July 2005
• Bomb scare on the Blue Line
• Lack of effective communication at the
station level
• People used CTA Tattler as an avenue for
gripes
• But in these gripes was gold
8. Enter UPOC
• I had worked with a free wireless
notification utility at www.upoc.com and
thought it might be useful
9. So I started CTA Alerts
• Rider-to-rider communication in the event
of service disruption or emergency on the
Chicago Transit Authority.
• The CTA itself immediately got involved--
approved at a CTA Board Meeting days
after launch
• For years, they used the system as a quasi-
official outlet for information
11. Keys to loosely coupled
relationships with government
• Community/ constituency
• No cost to entry
• Responsible, reliable developers
• Lack of contracts or formal responsibilities
• Tone of cooperation-- trust
12. The relationship has
continued
• Through leadership changes
• Ron Huberman, Richard Rodriguez, at the
operations level
• Through technology changes
• New Web site, their own alerts, RSS
• Again: loosely coupled
13. Our own software
changes
• UPOC is dumb
• People want to subscribe to specific lines
• Twitter and FaceBook emerge as platforms
• My own lack of skills become more of a
pain in the butt