I had the privilege of attending this morning's press event and live Twittered, so if you'd like to know more about what was said, see my Twitterstream. Press coverage is starting to appear (the Toronto Star is up with Website measures local carbon footprints), and watch the news tonight for footage from CBC and Citytv, both of whom sent camera crews. Mayor Miller apparently loves it and was there to say lots of nice things, which is always a good endorsement. Check it out for yourself!

6:00pm
Demo: AskItOnline.com (Kaitlyn McLachlan, Clear Sky Media, http://www.askitonline.com)

6:15pm
Demo: GigPark (Pema Hegan, Noah Godfrey, http://www.gigpark.com)

6:30pm
Demo: Mono Project .NET Development on a Mac (Geoff Norton, http://www.mono-project.com/)

6:45pm
Demo: PlanetEye (Butch Langlois, http://www.planeteye.com)

7:00pm
Demo: SceneCaster (Alain Chesnais, http://www.scenecaster.com)

7:15pm
20 minute break

7:35pm
Ignite: The Future Is Simple (Geo Perdis, http://mediaworks.ca/)

7:50pm
Social Services Mashup (Clara Severino, UofT, Partnership) 

8:05pm
How to Rock SXSW (Rannie Turingan, http://PhotoJunkie.ca)

8:20pm
The State of Wireless in Canada Sucks (Tom Purves, http://wirelessnorth.ca/)

8:35pm
Leveraging Wide Open (Mike Beltzner, http://www.mozilla.com)

8:40pm
20 minute wrap up and social

9:00pm - 11:00pm
Duke of Westminster (http://westminster.thedukepubs.ca/) will have finger foods for us and is staying open an extra hour so you can get your drink on :)

Date: Monday, February 25th, 2008
Time: 6:00pm to 9:00pm
Location: Toronto Board of Trade, 1 First Canadian Place, Toronto, ON
Cost: Free (cash bar if you're thirsty)

Dinner will be served, the Demos will be excellent, the Ignites will ignite, and then we'll adjourn to The Duke of Westminster for more food and drinks.

As always, details are available at on the BarCamp's  DemoCampToronto17 page, 'tickets' are at Eventbrite, and those wishing to sign up for a demo or ignite session can do so via the Wufoo DemoCamp form.

We've seen a lot of turnover at recent DemoCamps and we're always happy to welcome new faces into the crowd. Since this is the first DemoCamp of 2008, we're going to change the old "bring a new person" rule around a bit and ask everyone to "bring a new person AND an old friend who hasn't been out in a while". Things have changed a lot since our humble beginnings around the BubbleShare board room table, so let's bring them back and show them what's new!

Lastly, we're always looking for individuals or companies who would like to put up $200 and help make the event possible. If you're interested, please contact me directly and I can give you a rundown of what's involved.

Hope to see everyone there!

There are magazines about business, and then there's the Harvard Business Review. If you're at all involved in doing business in the western world, odds are you've read an article from HBR or even have a subscription. It would not be an exaggeration to say that a whole generation of thought and business leaders have been shaped by the content HBR has published. And so, along with my co-authors Eli Singer and Mark Kuznicki, it is my incredible honour to annouce the publication of our article, titled Sick Transit Gloria, in the Breakthrough Ideas for 2008 section of the February issue of the Harvard Business Review.

Our short piece shares the story of Toronto TransitCamp with a general business audience. We're in great company and I highly recommend you take a few mintues from your busy day to read through some of the articles on the Breakthrough Ideas for 2008 site. We'd also love if you would take an additional moment (we're so needy!) to vote for TransitCamp in the Best Unconference in BlogTO's Best of Independent Toronto Poll.

For those of you who aren't familiar with TransitCamp, our article tells the tale of a community and a public agency coming together in an innovative new way to solve problems together, using technology and social media and the BarCamp unconference toolkit to change their relationship. We're very proud to have helped the Toronto Transit Commission to usher in a new era of collaboration with its customers and community stakeholders! For more information, read the article in Harvard Business Review or check out the HBR page on the TransitCamp wiki for links that provide a comprehensive overview of the background, the design, the experience, the media coverage, the conceptual foundations and the influence of TransitCamp.

As authors, we want to be clear that while our names may appear in the byline of this article, these ideas and the event itself were created and inspired by a group of local community participants and peers and global thought leaders who both helped and inspired us. We would like to acknowledge those contributions and inspirations here:

Our friends who helped make TransitCamp happen: Robert Ouellette, ReadingToronto; Tim Shore, BlogTO; David Topping, Torontoist; Matt Blackett, Spacing; Adam Giambrone; David Crow; Bryce Johnson; Joey Devilla; Madhava Enros; Michael Glenn; Misha Glouberman; Julia Breckenreid; Ryan Feeley; Kieran Huggins; Andrew Moore; Kevin Bracken & Lori Kuffner, Newmindspace; Rannie Turingan, photojunkie; Patrick Dinnen

Friends and inspirations: Alec Saunders, Iotum; Amber MacArthur; Alex Lowy; Andrew Baron, Dembot; Anthony Williams; Arieh Singer; Audrey Carr, Between Us; Austin Hill, Billions with Zero Knowledge; Ben McConnel and Jackie Huba, Church of the Customer Blog; Bianca Goldman, A Wee Bit Skint; Bonnie, Ernie & Rachel, GreatCycling; Brian Oberkirch, Like it Matters; Cambrian House; Chris & Jessie, Istoica; Chris Anderson, The Long Tail; Chris Messina, FactoryCity; Colin Henderson, The Bankwatch; Colin Smillie; Cory Doctrow, Craphound; David Eaves; David Gray, Communication Nation; David Pritchard; David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous; Doc Searls; Don Tapscott; Elspeth Roundtree; Eric Goldman, Napoleon's Gambit; Ev Williams, Evhead; Greg Wilson, The Third Bit; Guy Kawasaki, How to Change the World; Howard Rheingold; Hugh MacLeod, gapingvoid; Iris Glaser, Tailor Communications Design; Jason Kottke; James Bow, Transit Toronto; James Cherkoff, Modern Marketing; Jeannette Hanna & Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing; Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine; Jeremiah Owyang; Jesse Hirsh; Jevon MacDonald, socialwrite.com; Mike Beltzner; Joe Clark; John Battelle, Searchblog; John Moore, Brand Autopsy; Johnnie Moore; Joseph Thornley, Pro PR; Karen Quinn Fung; Kate Trgovac, My Name is Kate; Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users; Kelly Seagram; Kenyatta Cheese, Braintag; Lawrence Lessig; Lee Goldman; Lee Odden; Leila Boujane, Idee, Inc.; Lloyd Alter, treehugger; Maggie Fox, Social Media Group; Mark Dowds, Mark Evans, A Canadian Take on the Web; Mark Raheja; Mark Surman, commonspace; Martin Cleaver; Matt Mason; Matt Mullenweg, Photo Matt; Matthew Dewall, Maybe Sorta Kinda; Matthew Ingram; Michael Anton Dila, Torch is Wicked; Michael Lenczner; Michael O'Connor Clarke; Michael Geist; Michael Seaton, The Client Side Blog; Michelle Perras, Shot From the Hip; Mitch Joel, Six Pixels of Separation; Nicholas Carr, Rough Type; Nikki Goldman; Om Malik, GigaOm; Peter Francey; Phil Hood;Richard Florida; Riccardo Cambiassi; Rob Hyndman; Robert Scoble, Scobleizer; Ryan Coleman Found in Translation; Saul Colt, The Smartest Man in the World; Scott Beale, Laughing Squid; Sean Howard, Craphammer; Sean P. Aune; Sean Wise; Seth Godin; Shel Israel, Global Neighbourhoods; Steve Munro; Steve Rubel, Micropersuasions; Stowe Boyd, /message; Stuart MacDonald; Sulemaan Ahmed; Tara Hunt, HorsePigCow; Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld, Techcrunch; Thomas Purves; Tim O'Reilly; Todd Defren, PR Squared; Tom Davenport, Make IT Matter; Tom Williams, the $5 philanthropist; Tom Peters; Will Pate; Yochai Benkler

The kind of thinking which leads to the creation of photoblogs may not seem all that innovative to our readers who regularly dabble in the Web 2.0 Black Arts and belong to the AJAX Guild, but the concept of blogs is still foreign for a lot of our clients. Our good friend Eli Singer, Web Maverick over at Cundari SFP (watch out for the Flashtastrophe), has been working with the ROM to bring them into the modern age. Sites like the Photo Diary are simple to setup and don't have a big maintenance overhead, especially if the photos are being shot anyway. We highly recommend the addition of freshly updated content to your website, particularly in blog form, as a primary driver of increased organic search engine traffic.

Download the Quicktime or Download the MP4

My talk went well (The Anatomy of a Facebook Application notes, courtesy of Jordan Christensen). I got a chance to chat with our favourite Citytv reporter, Amber MacArthur, as well as our new friend Eli Glasner, National Arts Reporter for the CBC Radio News. He generously provided us with an MP3 of the interview, which is included below for your listening pleasure:

© CBC Radio News

Update from Allen Gelberg, Director of the Collaboration Centre at MaRS and the man who generously donated last night's space for FacebookCampToronto:

FYI overall attendees were 453. That is 400 in the Auditorium and 53 in CR-3 where we were simulcasting into.

6:00	Social/Mingling
6:30	Introduction by Colin, Roy & Andrew
6:40	Best Practices around Product Design and Viral Marketing (Meagan Marks, Facebook.com)
7:30	Anatomy of a Facebook Application (Jay Goldman, Radiant Core)
7:50	FBML Overview (Sunil Boodram, Trapeze Media)
8:10	FQL Overview (Craig Saila)
8:30	Updating the Facebook Profile (Colin Smillie, Refresh Partners)
8:50	Demo: .Net Sample Application (Ricardo Covo)
9:00	Demo: Carpool by Zimride (Rajat Suri)
9:10	Demo: My Aquarium by Greg Thomson
9:20	Wrap-up & drinks

If you're reading this after the fact, welcome to Radiant Core! Don't forget to check out our Careers section for some great positions, including Facebook app development :)

Not to be copied, reproduced or broadcast without the express written permission of the Toronto Transit Commission - Copyright 2007.

So, we'll leave it as an exercise to someone else who feels like tangling with the TTC's legal team. In the meantime, watch for the amazing old footage of the streetcars, the cool rebuild of a streetcar's drive system, concept footage of the new Light Rail and Subway cars coming in the next ten - fifteen years, and talk of the new transponder system currently being installed which allows for the nifty automated station announcements and (ominously?) for the possibility of automated train control. Is it just us or does the TTC's new command centre remind you of 1983's War Games (that was twenty four years ago?!)? And also, where are all the women in this futuristic nerve centre?

It's great to see material like this which goes deeper than a simple puff piece to really give a sense of the complexity involved in running North America's third largest transit system (following New York City and Mexico City). Suddenly makes it seem entirely reasonable that they have trouble paying for it when you realize that it's not just about having buses and subways run but about all of the infrastructure that goes into running them.

DemoCampToronto14
Monday, September 17, 2007 6:00 pm ET - 9:00 pm ET
Toronto Board of Trade

We're trying a new venue out this time, with the generous support of the BoT (who are subsidizing their regular rental fee for the room). We're also trying out a new format, featuring 6 demos (5 minutes for demo/5 minutes for questions), followed by 6 Ignite! style presentations. If you'd like to demo or do a presentation, contact the esteemed David Crow, keeper of the DemoCamp flame. See you there!

First Richard Florida, author of such well known (and loved) books as The Rise of the Creative Class, Cities and the Creative Class, and The Flight of the Creative Class (notice a trend?), appeared on the Colbert Report on Monday and sorta announced that he's moved to our fair city to take a job teaching Business and Creativity at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management (he hasn't made the faculty list on the website yet, which I'm sure it's just a matter of time, but they do have a very happy press release). You may be able to tell, from the run-on-ness of the first sentence, that his arrival in Toronto is very exciting and yet another herald of our coming of age as a global city.

Speaking of global cities, the July issue of Fast Company includes an article (Fast Cities 2007), in which they break down their list of the world's Fastest ones. The numbers came from Carnegie Mellon's Kevin Stolarick (who, in a matter of cosmic coincidence that will baffle the mystics forevermore, was the statistics guru behind Richard Florida's research!), along with data from CEOs for Cities' CityVitals survey, authored by Joseph Cortright of Impresa Inc.; sustainability data from SustainLane; and insights from the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. Toronto was listed in the Global Villages grouping (along with Johannesburg - my birthplace - and Berlin), although we probably could have made it into any of the groups except Unexpected Oases and, sadly, Startup Hubs. I have to take some umbrage with their description of Toronto: it reads more like it was lifted from a clueless guide book than that it actually talks to the concept of Toronto as a Global Village (Gehry's building is hardly part of the skyline, I would hardly call all 29 of the festivals 'major', and they sacrificed any mention of our amazingly varied dining options for a course at U of T which is probably offered by all major universities). All the same, it's an impressive list and it's a pleasure to be listed. Go us!

But that was not to be! Thanks to the incredible generosity of the conference organizers, I've been invited to attend the upcoming Supernova next week in San Francisco. I'm particularly excited about this one because it combines two of my passions - technology and business - in a forum packed with industry leaders and mover/shakers (similar to cocktail shakers in that their presence at these events is often combined with a fair amount of alcohol and that merely standing near them can sometimes make you tipsy with excitement). A particular thanks to Deb Schultz for the gracious invitation, and for some advice on an upcoming Radiant Core project which I can't talk about just yet.

The schedule looks particularly tasty: they're running an OpenSpaces event on Tuesday at Wharton West, and those who know me know that I'm drawn to those events like a moth to a self-organized, community-driven, meritocracy-based flame. Be still my beating heart and pray that AA gets me to SF in time to catch part of it!

Wednesday is Challenge Day, a series of workshop like events "designed to provoke opinions from leading technology and business thought-leaders on key Supernova topics". I'm particularly looking forward to Making Computers Smart: A Dumb Idea? (Moderator: John Markoff, Barney Pell, Elizabeth Charnock, Nova Spivack), Introducing the Relationship Economy (Jerry Michalski, David Weinberger, Doc Searls), Research and Relationships (Discussion Lead Max Kalehoff, Aaron Coldiron, Steven Haskel, Jonathan Carson), and Where's the Innovation? (Lightning Talks).

Thursday and Friday move into more traditional session days, with everybody moving through a series of talks and presentations together. Topics range from Dark Matter: Are We Missing the Real Internet Economy? to The Social Web: Choices and Voices to Disorder: Feature or Bug?. It all looks pretty interesting, and I plan to blog as much of it as I can, bandwidth allowing (in both the time and network senses).

Registration is still open and I highly recommend it if you're involved in the web. It's not a particularly cheap conference (the Challenge Day is a great deal at $695, the full three days will run you $2,595), but the caliber of the participants is high and the sessions are quite small so you're virtually guaranteed to make some good contacts. If you're going and want to meet, drop a comment on this post or find me on Twitter.

Before the official festivities kick off on Monday morning with an address from Mayor Miller, join us for BarCamp TTW, running on Saturday, May 26th, in the U of T - Bissel Building at 140 St. George Street. Sign up on the wiki, throw on your best Participatory Culture hat, and come be part of Toronto's fourth BarCamp!

Thanks again for your help in soliciting and compiling the submissions on the blogs concerning the TTC website redesign.

I presented the results to the TTC e-systems committee last week. To the credit of TTC staff, many of the suggestions had already been anticipated in the original RFP. However, some were not, and thanks in part to the consultation, it became clear during the discussion that the project should be reconsidered. The bloggers' suggestions were very helpful in this determination.

The committee recommended withdrawing, re-writing and re-issuing the RFP to reflect what I think is a more ambitious and exciting project. This decision might add a little extra time--maybe a few months--but we think it will result in a better website, so it's worth doing.

I'll keep you posted on developments. In the meantime, of course, I am still very happy to receive comments and suggestions.

Thanks again for all your help,

Adam Giambrone
Toronto City Councillor
Ward 18 Davenport
Chair, Toronto Transit Commission (TTC)

We were really inspired by our good friend Robert Ouellette's post How Would You Improve The TTC Web Site? and thrilled at the ensuing support and coverage it collected during the first few weeks of the New Year. Some of Toronto's leading blogs leapt to support Robert's cause and quickly asked their readers to provide their ideas in the comments of the following posts:

• Spacing Wire: Help improve the TTC's website
• Torontoist: Help Make the TTC's Website The Better Way
• BlogTO: Bloggers Help TTC Website
• Transit Toronto: Giambrone Turns to Transit Fans for Suggestions

The Press rallied shortly thereafter, providing some pretty good coverage about Adam Giambrone, the TTC's new Chair, accepting Robert's offer and offering to review the feedback. Amongst the radio coverage on AM640 and CBC, the nation's newspapers rang in:

• National Post: Blogtown
• Globe & Mail: The TTC Gets Some Online Help

Here's Where We Come In

Figuring that we know a thing or two about building websites, we thought that we could offer some useful feedback to compliment the already excellent thoughts collecting in the comments on the original blog posts. In addition to our Solutions and Portfolio of experience, we know lots of really smart people who could bring a lot of value to the table. And so we did exactly that and gathered a crack team in Radiant Core's boardroom to scratch our heads and stroke our chins and ruminate on how we could help to better the better way. And what a crew it was! In addition to your intrepid scribe and Michael Glenn, our Architecturally Awesome VP of Technology, we invited (in alphabetical order - ranking a team of this calibre would be impossible in anything but):

David CrowDébonair Developer

David is a passionate advocate for Toronto's technology community. An open community has catalyzed around David in the form of BarCamp, DemoCamp, and the Innovation Commons, reinforcing his belief that openness can spark innovation - "the community is the framework". David is an experience designer, consultant and a software developer.

Joey DeVillaAccordion Articulator

Jose Martin "Joey" deVilla is, among other things: The Thrilla from Manila, based in Toronto, Canada, Technical Evangelist for the web services company Tucows, and a guy who often takes his accordion with him, playing AC/DC, Nine Inch Nails and other pop and rock stuff on it.

Madhava EnrosTTC Guru

Madhava is a Toronto interface/interaction designer who spends, perhaps, too much time thinking about public transit. A dedicated TTC-rider, he has been following Toronto transit planning and policy matters for many years.

Mark KuznickiPolicy Wonk

Mark is a strategy consultant, policy wonk and a TorCamper. Mark's recent policy work includes consulting in cultural policy and in the development of an economic strategy for the entertainment and creative industries cluster. Mark's professional background includes work as a tech startup entrepreneur and in business analysis and tech project management in the financial services industry.

Will PateSocial Media Maven

Will is an all-around web geek: blogger, photographer, videogamer, online community and social media consultant. He's a peopleperson who seeks out technologies to enable self expression, connection, or the creating of meaning.

We really couldn't have asked for a more amazing brain trust. Will captured the moment as we settled in for some serious thinking:

And so we were off and running! Stand back folks, because we really rolled up our sleeves and did some serious analizing.

State of the Union

No one would argue that the TTC currently has a good website. If you've somehow been spared the pain of trying to find information on it, take a few minutes and do your own mini-review now: www.ttc.ca.

Sure, it's ugly and all, but just how bad is it? Here's the quick breakdown using a Radiant Core technique called The Five Thumbs - a quick set of five heuristics that you can use to evaluate any software or website. The Five Thumbs are easy to remember if you know your vowels (just think AEIOU and you'll be most of the way there):

1. Adaptive: a good tool adapts to the user rather than the user adapting to the tool. The TTC's site is very inflexible and forces visitors to do things very much in machine-speak like searching for routes by number rather than by name. The site also doesn't bend when it comes to the format of the information: as Henry Ford might have said, you can have it in any colour you'd like as long as it's a huge PDF or badly formatted HTML.
   
2. Expandable: a good website is easily expanded on by encouraging an ecosystem of third parties to build on a solid foundation. There's no way to get access to the wealth of data behind the site including schedules, stop locations, routes, etc. To make matters worse, the HTML is non-standard and schedules aren't presented in tables but rather spaced out using tab characters in a block of <pre> code, making them hard to parse by screen scrapers and readers.
3. Intuitive: the basic functions of a good tool are easy to figure out with minimal assistance. Given that the basic function of this site is to disseminate information, it's a tangled maze of bad Information Architecture which hides important details in deeply buried pages. Navigation is via HTML <select>s, form controls which are usually reserved for selecting options from a list and can cause problems for screen readers and other accessibility devices.
4. Open: how well does it play with others? We usually measure websites on how well they both render across browsers and validate for standards compliance, as well as how deeply they incorporate accessibility features like tabindexes, accesskeys, alt attributes on images and titles on links, etc. The W3's validators can't get passed the lack of a doctype attribute, though the site does fair somewhat better using Watchfire WebXact, which returns few serious accessibility issues.
5. Usable: how useable is it? This can be a fairly subjective measure, but empirical evidence from the comments left in the original blog posts suggests that users of the site have a very difficult time finding content.

The Better Way

It doesn't take a room full of web-savvy thinkers to come up with a great plan for the Commission's site as the way forward is obvious in many respects. We were pleased to see that the commenters on the original blog posts have thought of many of the same avenues (and even a few that we didn't touch on), so I highly recommend a read through them as well. Our thoughts, in no specific order:

Site Features and Functionality

• Trip planner
  • This one is a no-brainer: give us a tool to figure out the easiest way to get there and we'll ride more often. It's not a very original idea either; a quick perusal of Transit Authority sites will provide a dizzying tour of Trip Planners. Some pretty decent examples:
    • Bay Area
    • Hopstop for NYC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington
    • London
    • Mississauga
    • Ottawa
    • San Diego
    • Vancouver
  • Google has built a pretty fantastic Trip Planner for Transit on top of their already swell Google Maps: Google Transit. It's meant to be used by Transit Authorities all over the world to provide planning tools for their riders, and it currently provides coverage for nine US cities including Portland (the first city covered), and Seattle. The TTC and Google have been in talks for some time (see The TTC and Google on Spacing Wire from March 2006), though nothing has come of it yet. According to the Toronto Star article mentioned in that post, the Commission costed out its own route planner at $2 million, which sounds like a pretty expensive wheel re-invention to us! We'd like to see the TTC jump on the GT Bandwagon and publish the data in the Google Transit Feed format (see the API points below).
  • Any Planner they do build/use should make an effort to include other Transit Authorities in the area (e.g.: Go, Markham, etc.) in order to provide a seamless experience for the Great Transit Riders of the GTA.
  • Lots of people come to our fair city to visit and make their way around by transit, so it would be a great idea to include some bookmarked destinations and starting points to help them navigate more easily (e.g.: tourist spots, conference halls, shopping, hotels, etc.).
  • Although not required for the first version, mobile access would mean we could do trip planning on the go. Sure, the data rates from Rogers and Bell suck more than your average vampire, but it would give you one more reason to spring for that new iPhone you're all craving.
• Schedules and Route Maps
  • Easily printed route maps as PDFs (no more monolithic files with every route!). People like to carry schedules with them, so make handy-sized ones which we can print out and staple together to keep in our pockets. Better yet, offer schedules for download, pre-formatted for popular hand-held devices. It would also be great if you could add different schedules to a cart and have them packaged into a customized PDF that you could keep on your laptop or print out whenever it gets too dog-eared and weather worn.
  • Trip planners are great for "Get me from A to B" type foresight, but sometimes you just want to know what time the bus goes there and comes back here. The current site makes it fairly hard to find the first part and an exercise in repetition to get the second, so include a link to the opposite direction of travel on all schedules (e.g.: link to eastbound schedule on westbound page).
  • Consider changing the format of the schedules to something a bit more graphical and easy to follow. Nick Provart suggests a pretty good one (see here), an idea which we quite liked and seemed like an emergent de facto standard, but then again, just say Tufte and we're all ears (see pg. 46-47 of Envisioning Information for more information).
  • Each station in the system should have its own page, which can provide information (e.g.: washrooms, vendors/stores in the station, last/first train, bus connections, etc.) and could even be expanded to act as a hub for the community around the station (e.g.: upcoming neighbourhood events via RSS, etc.).
  • The TTC Timeline system was ahead of its time - a phone number for every stop with recorded schedule information - so far ahead, in fact, that it's one of the only real Y2K bugs that we know about. The system was shut down in late 1999 as it become evident that "...the TimeLine system is not Year 2000 compliant and because of the age of the system hardware and other factors, it cannot be upgraded in a cost-effective and timely fashion to allow for its continued use past December 31, 1999." (see TTC Report F591). We'd like to see a return of the Timeline, but this time as an SMS-based service which works by sending your stop ID to a TTC shortcode and getting a schedule update back. The same stop IDs can be used throughout the Schedules and Route maps to remain consistent across the whole system and to make it easy to get schedule info whenever you see an ID.
  • The City of Chicago is running an experimental, GPS-based bus tracker on their #20 line, which gives a hint of what a system like that could deliver. In addition to providing automated recordings of stop announcements on vehicles, it offers the tantalizing possibility of in-stop signage with updated arrival times (à la York Viva system), accurate web-based schedules and maps, and the promise of not having to stand in freezing rain with no streetcar in sight.
• Schedule Updates
  • Include a blog (with RSS feed!) of closures, schedule changes, etc. Use categories to indicate which type of service is being disrupted (e.g.: Subway, Bus, Streetcar) and/or areas of the city affected.
  • Although frequent transit users might get a chance to travel the length and breadth of the system, most of us just wear a groove into our favourite routes. General information about changes is important, but also build the system to allow users to register those routes and subscribe to updates and changes by email, SMS, and RSS.
• Ecommerce
  • It's 2007 and high time that the TTC boarded the eCommerce train! The Metropass Discount Plan is a great idea, but it would be substantially better if we could complete an online form to apply and provide a credit card number to pay for it. Faxing is so 1843 (no, really). There have been rumblings for a while now that the TTC will consolidate with other GTA Transit Authorities on a Smart Card for fares which would negate this, but that might still be a ways off (personally, we're hoping for something like the Octopus Card).
  • Partner with people who produce merchandise that we'll actually buy and build out a great online store to sell it in. We suggest starting with the Spacing station buttons and Torontoist T-shirts, but this city is jam packed with creatives who are just itching to submit their own designs. Take a cue from Threadless and crowdsource the designs to help support our arts scene. And please (please!) spare us the Legacy Sportswear gear which has been passing as Official TTC Merchandise. No offence to them - we're sure they do great work - but stamping the TTC logo onto a catalogue full of generic items isn't what we're looking for.
• Online trip booking for Wheel-Trans. Danny, in the comments on the Spacing original post, tells a horrible tale of trying to make a booking via the antiquated phone system. Wheel-Trans provides mobility to people who would otherwise not have it, and we'd like to see the service made even easier by a full web-integration.
• Multi-lingual Content beyond a pre-canned page of info. We live in one of the world's most multi-cultural cities, a fact that we love to trumpet, and the information on the TTC's website should reflect that. Here's another opportunity for crowdsourcing: post the info in English and provide a translation UI so the community can work its magic.
• TTC API (Application Programming Interface)
  • Open the walled garden and encourage the development of an ecosystem of user-created applications built on the TTC's data (routes, schedules, etc.). Our city is full of tech people who love whipping up new mashups and projects if you just give them the tools, so open the treasure chest and share the wealth. See this great Google Maps/TTC mashup as an example, built by Ian Stevens.
  • Use the Google Transit Feed format, which will likely become a de facto standard for transit data, but make sure its open and available to everyone. Build a system which requires an API key if control over bandwidth costs is a concern (like Google Maps, WordPress, and Flickr to name a few), or use a service like Amazon's S3 to host the feed.
• Build a Web Standards compliant website with no (or almost no Flash). See our blog post, All Flash = Bad, for an explanation on why building all Flash based websites is just asking for a flashtastrophe.
• Navigation
  • Navigation needs to move away from <select>s and into a more logical structure with more accessible controls.
  • URLs for pages should be logical in order to increase ease of navigation (e.g.: http://www.ttc.ca/metropass instead of http://www.toronto.ca/ttc/metropass_steps.htm). Human readable URLs are a great boon for people emailing links to each other, or for people looking through web traffic reports ("Great! 1,235 people visited the page showContent.php?id=27! Now which page is that?" vs. "Great! 1,235 people visited the page content/ttcwebsiteredesign!"). It's also a really good idea to hide the implementation of the site because it means you can more easily change your backend technology down the road without orphaning millions of bookmarks (e.g.: don't end your URLs in .html or .php, but use a feature like mod_rewrite to rewrite URLs from human readable to machine format, so http://www.ttc.ca/metropass/signup gets rewritten behind the scenes to http://www.ttc.ca/metropass/signup.jsp).
• Visual Design and Navigation
  • The People love the TTC font, so use it!
  • How about using some of those fantastic T.O. photobloggers TTC images?
  • Station pages should use their unique tile patterns as visual elements.

Process

• Despite our knowledge of websites and best practices, we weren't able to answer a central question which needs to be covered: who uses the site and what do they use it for? You can't do a good job of building a huge site which is optimized for everyone, but you can do a fantastic job of building highly optimized micro-sites which share designs and content. The City of Toronto does a pretty good job of splitting their content into four basic groups depending on what you want to do (Living in Toronto, Doing Business, Visiting Toronto, Accessing City Hall), and the colour coding makes it easy to keep track of where you are. Once the TTC has answered the central question, it's easier to break the site down into similar groupings and optimize the Information Architecture around goals (e.g.: Frequent Riders, Visiting Toronto, Selling to the TTC, etc.).
• We also ran into an obstacle establishing what the central goal for the website was, other than to provide information. Madhava has an excellent knowledge of the politics and history of the Commission and provided great insight into the fine balance between funding and ridership, which led us to discern that increasing ridership on suburban routes might be an important goal that the website could help to serve (particularly through schedule update subscriptions, SMS Stop Service, GPS tracking, etc.). That's a good start, but we would need more information to really finish a goals analysis.
• Building the site is only part of the battle; maintaining a site of this size and complexity in a healthy manner requires a team of dedicated personnel. The TTC needs to make sure that they build that cost into their budgets, whether the team be internal or outsourced (or some combination). Can we convince the TTC to try a radically different, non-centralized approach to managing the site? Perhaps we can marry the two halves of the brain and have a Community Ombudsperson oversee the marriage between the central authority of the Commission and a community of volunteer web managers and moderators. This doesn't need to go as far as a wiki (although it would be a very good approach!), but there are many happy mediums between a monologue and a full conversation.
• The Community is here to help! Despite what we perceived as an almost tangible antagonism between the Commission and its dedicated Ridership (see Withdraw anagram map lawsuit threat for an example), we still love the Red Rocket and we want to be part of the solution. Use us for our advice and skills and make sure that the process of building the new site is open and transparent. David likes to say that the "community is the framework", and that applies here just as much as it does there. We're riding a wave of new interest in our city and in the grassroots capabilities celebrated by initiatives like the Centre for Social Innovation, so sow some seeds and (to quote Guy Kawasaki intentionally misquoting Chairman Mao), let a thousand flowers bloom.

What's Next?

If you're still reading, we admire your persistence :) A few final thoughts on where we'd like to see this go from here:

• The TTC should re-open the RFP for the Website Redesign. The original RFP closed on Thursday, November 23, 2006 and received responses from a number of traditional web shops (you can find the RFP info by browsing the somewhat confusing and highly frame-based TTC Materials & Procurements site, or by going straight to the otherwise-framed P01DR06363). The Planned Award date is February 1st, 2007 (which recently changed from January 29th), but we think a strong case can be made for the requirements having changed substantial as a result of the change in Commission Chair and the process kicked off by Robert's post - strong enough that the original RFP should be replaced.
• The TTC should completely embrace the community. Soliciting feedback via blogs is a great start, but we'd like to see Adam Giambrone extend that initiative by keeping the rest of this process open and transparent (keep an eye on this space for a forthcoming announcement on this very topic). Collecting feedback in such a public fashion is an amazing step forward and we salute it wholeheartedly! Let's keep moving in the same direction.
• The TTC should set a goal of building the best Transit Authority website in the world. Our former Mayor, Mel Lastman, was perhaps overly found of calling Toronto a world-class city, but he was often right. Even the best Transit websites out there don't set the bar very high and we feel that this is an opportunity to demonstrate our technology and transit leadership by establishing a new watermark.

As always, we look forward to your comments! Help us help the TTC and everyone wins.