My part of a presentation given with Harper Reed and Jon Trowbridge on April 10, 2009-- "Hacking the CTA"

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

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

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

7. Tons of details-- but
wrong place, wrong time

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

10. Some username issues
at first

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

14. Enter Harper Reed

15. Pumping UPOC messages
and CTA RSS to Twitter

16. More to come
• More community
• Retweet
mechanism
• Not to be
morose, but it’s
more useful in an
emergency