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By Luke, 4 October, 2012 8:00 am

Last Monday 24 September,  GeoVation – hosted “Collaboration and User Innovation in Transport” at the Royal Society of Arts, London.

Whilst this was a GeoVation event with a different flavour, in so much that funding wasn’t up for grabs on this occasion; the open and collaborative ethos that typifies GeoVation was very much utilised throughout the day. Peter ter Haar, Director of Products at Ordnance Survey kicked off proceedings with a welcome and introduction.

Peter ter Haar’s welcome and introduction

This was followed by a number of thought-provoking presentations, videos, posters and discussions compered by Richard Kemp-Harper of the Technology Strategy Board.

Continue reading 'Collaboration and User Innovation in Transport – presentations now available'»

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By Luke, 4 September, 2012 9:00 am

We are pleased to announce our next event – “Collaboration and User Innovation in Transport”  – which will take place at the Royal Society of Arts, in London on 24 September 2012. Brought to you by GeoVation and supported by Ordnance Survey, the Ideas in Transit project, Department for Transport, Technology Strategy Board and SBRI.

With rapid developments in social media technology, smartphone apps, open data, and volunteered geographic information, in a context of doing more with less and doing that sustainably, ‘Collaboration and User Innovation in Transport’ considers: Continue reading 'GeoVation – Collaboration and User Innovation in Transport'»

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By viv, 26 January, 2012 8:00 am

In September 2011, GeoVation challenge winner’s liftshare began development of ‘myPTP- A Travel Plan Just for Me’; an innovative web-based tool, designed to provide personalised travel plans to individuals at a fraction of the current time and cost.

liftshare’s myPTP Project Manager, Katie Lumley, gives us a most up-to-date progress report on how the tool has been shaping up over the last 5 months:

Since September 2011, the liftshare project team have been working hard to develop and refine one of our most exciting projects – myPTP – funded through GeoVation and the Ideas in Transit project.  myPTP will uniquely combine public transport, walking, cycling, and car-share options for individual journeys, and have the potential to help any organisation or community effectively deliver personalised travel plans (PTPs) at a fraction of the current time and cost associated with traditional approaches.

myPTP encourages and enables users to make informed choices about the way they travel.

Development began with design, before working to build, test, and refine the new and innovative web-based tool. During November, our biggest hurdle; accessing data for all modes of transport (walk, cycle, car-share, bus and train) across the UK, was overcome, and work to integrate data for all transport options then began in December.

Users will input individual’s journey information and in return will receive clear information on all transport options available to them, including maps, local provision options such as community transport, and any incentives the organisation has put in place to change their travel behaviour e.g. a week’s free bus pass. Ongoing communication is then possible to monitor modal shift and follow up changes in provision etc. Below is a sneak-preview of the online myPTP results:

Over 38 organisations have already expressed interest in using myPTP to deliver PTPs to individuals, and of those three organisations have been chosen to pilot the tool this February. These initial tests will be carried out in collaboration with researchers from the University of West of England, through the Ideas in Transit project, and will help us to evaluate the usefulness and usability of myPTP from an end-user point of view (that’s me and you!), as well as assess its impact ongoing on travel behaviours. We are looking forward to hearing feedback from the test pilots so we can keep innovating and refining myPTP to ensure it is useful and effective for all.

We are very excited with the progress of myPTP so far; both internal development of the tool itself, as well as its seeming ability to appeal and meet individuals, organisations, and transport operator needs. If you would like to:

• Help individuals make informed smarter choices about their mode of travel, as well as improve accessibility.
• Better understand transport patterns of your organisation, to increase efficiency and save time and cost.
• Help Local Authorities determine shortfalls in provision and help local transport operators determine what services will best satisfy demand.
• Have on-going communication with individuals about their travel options to achieve real modal shift, and to relay any possible changes in provision.

myPTP could be your solution. For more information please feel free to contact me, Katie Lumley, on: (01953) 451166 or katie@liftshare.com.

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By viv, 19 January, 2012 8:00 am

If you’re wondering how our GeoVation Challenge winner, AccessAdvsr is getting on with development, then find out more below in an update from Neil Taylor:

Since our last blog we have been working closely with our software developers, Realistic Digital, to create and refine the AccessAdvisr website on the basis of the specification we drew up in the autumn.  As total newbies to the field of web-app development this has been a great experience for our team, and we have been learning a massive amount about the process (and pitfalls!) of working to create an innovative web-based project.

The great news is that we now know our webservices from our browser optimisation, and are almost ready to start proof-of-concept testing with real live people here in Nottingham.  This is also excellent news for our colleagues at ITP, who will soon be able to speak to us about the weather, sports, current affairs and other projects without fearing they may get drawn into a debate about ‘Where the search bar should go’, or ‘Should the favourites button be bigger’ (I still say it should…).

We are also looking forward to collaborating with colleagues at Loughborough University’s Design School through the Ideas in Transit project.  They have been helping us to draw up an evaluation plan that is rooted in various innovation and end-user behaviour theories to give us the lowdown on what people actually think about the concept, the site itself, and the way they use it.  This iterative process will be the first acid test for the site, and will no doubt pose us as many questions as answers.  Nonetheless we are really looking forward to hearing people’s thoughts and views.

Here is an ‘in-development’ screenshot for a sneak preview of how the site is shaping up:

If you want to learn more about AccessAdvisr, then please contact me, Neil Taylor at ITP on 0115 9886903, or email: taylor@itpworld.net.  Access Advisr is also now on Facebook, so you can ‘like’ us to keep up with all the latest project developments.

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By viv, 19 October, 2011 8:00 am

Catch up with Mission:Explore with this update from Daniel Raven-Ellison:

12 days ago we released our new Mission:Explore website, since then we have watched as young and old(er) explorers have accepted, completed and then reported a wide range of missions. People have been photographing where the ‘wild’ is taking over from civilization, designing memorials and earning rewards for doing so. One explorer (Sir Spiffington) has already created his own website which includes a great animation and a funny film, all inspired by the new site.

Making the Mission:Explore website is a continual process. The funding that we won 5 months ago through GeoVation from Ideas in Transit and the Technology Strategy Board has allowed us to implement a number of significant features. These include:

• Partner accounts which let other organisations create their own challenges;
• Scoring and leaderboards, which will soon also include groups;
• An extras box on mission pages which includes QR codes that can be scanned for quick access to the relevant page along with a widget which can sit on other websites;
• Explorer profile pages so that users can keep track of started and completed missions, their points and keep an explorer log;
• A content management system for creating, risk checking, tagging, scoring and publishing missions;
• A split community with those not logged in and aged 12 or under not being able to see user generated content and missions which are rated for older users.

National Geographic Education are already using the site for their work in promoting geography awareness week.  I presented on Mission:Explore for teachers supporting National Geographic in Portland in August and you can see the videos from this here . Love Forest, OPAL, Priory School, the Geographical Association and many others are currently live on Mission:Explore or soon will be.

The core of the GeoVation work is to see how Mission:Explore can be used to increase the number of family leisure users on the National Cycle Network. Crucially, we want them to come back too. We are working with Sustrans not only to create the challenges but also to monitor user numbers in the field. An additional component is a the work we are doing within the project for the dairy company Arla. Arla want to bring a wide range of children Closer to Nature and we are bringing all of this together by using Mission:Explore and the National Cycle Network to draw young people out of sub-urban areas an into ‘nature spaces’. Our first trial will take place in Berkshire next month and we will be using our findings from this work to decide our following steps.

Last week we were lucky enough to be invited by the Technology Strategy Board to have a stand at Innovate ’11, the innovation networking event and exhibition. This is an example of the one of the unexpected benefits of working with GeoVation that has been a great help to our work. Innovate ’11 is was an awesome event and one that I would recommend you attend in the future if you are interested in cutting-edge innovation and creativity. At Innovate much of the interest in Mission:Explore was for rebranding it so that organisations or regions could have their own bespoke versions.

We are now at a stage where we are looking for GeoVators to GeoVate with us. We have a limited number of free accounts on Mission:Explore which can be used by charities and public sector organisations to create games, hunts, trails, learning activities and more. If you or someone you know would be interested in this offer they should email us at hello@missionexplore.net to find out more.

We will be blogging again next month with an update on our work to increase users of the National Cycle Network.

You can become an explorer on Mission:Explore for free by visiting www.missionexplore.net.

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By viv, 30 September, 2011 8:30 am

Cyclestreets won £27 000 in the ‘How can we improve transport in Britain?’ GeoVation Challenge to develop a toolkit for groups across the country to campaign for better cycling facilities.  Below, Martin from Cyclestreets updates us on developments:

Meet our developer team!
I’m pleased to say that we’ve appointed a developer team and work is  proceeding fast. The team comprises Andy Allan, Andrew France, plus myself (Martin Lucas-Smith) from CycleStreets as project manager. Andy and Andrew will be working in it on solidly for the next few months so that a large amount of development can be done.

We’ve also developed the spec further at a two-day developer meeting last week which kicked-off the work. Read more here.

This is an open-source project. The code is being developed at https://github.com/cyclestreets/toolkit We’ll be looking for volunteers towards the end of October to join in, once much of the initial base of the system is in place.

Design
We’re finalising a design brief and will be approaching designers very  soon. If you know of a really great designer or design company, preferably someone who might be willing to help out at perhaps a slightly discounted rate, please do let us have their details.

All in all, it’s been an extremely busy few weeks. The development of the toolkit has been possible thanks to our  GeoVation award, which secured us £27,000 of funding. GeoVation is an  Ordnance Survey initiative and forms part of the Ideas in Transit  project with funding from the Technology Strategy Board and the Department for Transport.

Martin Lucas-Smith, Cyclestreets

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By viv, 22 August, 2011 8:00 am

In May, CycleStreets won £27 000 in the ‘How can we improve transport in Britain?’ GeoVation Challenge which was funded by Ideas in Transit and Ordnance Survey.

The funding is to help them build a new toolkit for groups across the country to campaign for better cycling facilities.  Now they’re looking for a name for it!

They want the name to reflect the theme of a central place where UK cycle users can submit problems they encounter on the streets.

Can you help suggest a catchy name? To find out more about what they’re looking for and ideas they’ve had so far visit their blog.

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By viv, 19 August, 2011 8:00 am

Mission:Explore, one of our GeoVation Challenge winners, have been busy planning missions to encourage children and families to use the National Cycle Network and lots of other exciting stuff too.  Below, Daniel from Mission:Explore tells us more about it.

Things are moving along quickly here at Mission:Explore and we are very excited about the coming year. Winning the support of GeoVation, Ideas in Transit and the University of West England means a brand new Mission:Explore website with lots of beautiful and new functionality.

We won GeoVation funding to improve transport in Britain and specifically the National Cycle Network. Working closely with Sustrans and Arla we are creating challenges and activities that we call ‘missions’ along parts of the cycle network. When people discover these missions (online or through stickers in the landscape) they will be able to win points and earn badges. We will be experimenting to see how this kind of ‘gamification’ can create new uses and users of this important piece of infrastructure. We are very pleased to have Charles Musselwhite, a social psychologist from the University of West England, researching our work and helping us to make this project a success.

Unlike the current Mission:Explore, on the new platform users will have accounts, explorer blogs, leader boards and many other enhanced features.
Mission:Explore will be relaunched as www.MissionExplore.Net this September. We are delighted that National Geographic Education are using the platform to encourage another kind of behaviour change. The US based organisation are using MissionExplore.Net as their central campaigning tool for Geography Awareness Week . The site will be launching with 20 missions (take a look here ) which encourage children, teachers and families to explore their local communities and earn online Mapping, Storytelling, Photography and Take Action! badges. Taking place in November Geography Awareness Week aims to draw attention to the importance of ’geo-literacy, ensuring that people make well reasoned decisions about our nation’s economic competitiveness, national security, environmental sustainability, and the livability of our communities in the 21st century’. We are recently back from the National Conference for Geographic Education in Portland (Oregon) where we trained Geography Awareness Week coordinators in making the best use of Mission:Explore.

Moving forward we will be announcing a new pricing plan in which third sector organisations can create and manage their own ‘channel’ and missions on MissionExplore.Net from just £25 for 1 mission. They can also purchase a ‘white label’ version of the platform for their own use. Any charity or public sector organisation that places an order before the launch of MissionExplore.Net in September will enjoy a 15% discount on any selected plan.

For further details contact Daniel at daniel@thegeographycollective.co.uk.

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By viv, 5 May, 2011 12:41 pm

Well done to everyone who took part in the GeoVation Showcase yesterday at Ordnance Survey’s head office.

After an exciting day of pitching and presentations, the judging panel selected 6 winners from the ‘How can we improve transport in Britain?‘ Challenge to be awarded a share of £160 000 in seed funding (including £10 000 for best use of OS OpenData).

Mission: Explore and myPTP were awarded £36 500 each:

• Mission:Explore, whose  idea is to encourage children and their families to get cycling through completing missions located across the National Cycle Network, also won the Community Prize of £1 000 voted for by those at the Showcase.
• MyPTP, (Personal Transport Planner) idea for a journey planner that enables users to make informed travel choices in real-time.

Three others winners were awarded £27 000:

• CycleStreets with their idea Crowd-sourced cycling solutions. The  funding will help them built their cycling advocacy toolkit to help groups across the country campaign for better cycling facilities.
• My Society plan to implement their idea ‘FixMyTransport- Anywhere!‘ to encourage us all to become micro-activists when we find problems with the transport network.
• @ccessAdvisR whose idea is for a route planner for those with limited mobility to help take the stress out of journeys.

• London Cycle Map Campaign were awarded £6,000 in funding  for their idea of creating a colour coded Tube style map of the Capital’s cycling network.

The winners from our previous challenge  ‘How can Britain feed itself?’ were also awarded their seed funding to take their ideas forward.

• Foodnation - Louise Campbell was awarded £10 000 funding to enable her to develop a location based web and mobile application to promote locally grown food and farms.
• City Farmers – Helen Steer and Peter Boyce were awarded £3 500 to engage communities in local growing schemes using OS OpenData mapping.

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Audience participaton

Dan from Mission:Explore pitches

Helen and Peter from City Farmers

The GeoVation judging panel watch the pitches

Louise Campbell from Foodnation

Martin from Cyclestreets pitches

At the GeoVation Showcase

Neil Taylor with AccessAdvisR

Voting for the Community Award

Presentations to winners: AccessAdvisR

GeoVation cakes

Presentations to winners of How can Britain feed itself? - City Farmers

Peter Boyce and Helen Steer of City Farmers

Presentations to winners: Crowd-sourced cycling solutions

At the GeoVation Showcase

Presentations to winners: FixMyTransport Anywhere

Presentations to winners from How can Britain feed itself? Foodnation

GeoVation Judging panel

Presentations to winners: London Cycle Map Campaign

Audience

Ben Irvine and Simon Parker from London Cycle Map Campaign

Presentations to winners: Mission:Explore

Presentations to winners: myPTP

Presentations to finalists: OurMeetingPoint

Kate and Angela from Aberdeen University with OurMeetingPoint

Abby Couriers with their idea Parcel Tracker

James Swanston of Carbon Voyage with Sustainable Mobility Platform

Congratulations to all the winners and thank you to everyone who has participated in both the challenges.

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By viv, 7 April, 2011 8:30 am

Find out more about some of the great ideas selected to go forward to the GeoVation Showcase on 4 May.

Today, Cyclestreets describe their Crowd-sourced cycling solution idea, Neil Taylor of ITP tells us more about @ccessadvisR and you can read about mySociety’s Fix My Transport idea to alert authorities to small problems and get them fixed.

Three ideas were described on Tuesday and a further three yesterday.  If you want to see these and other ideas pitch for a slice of £150 000 funding from Ideas in Transit plus an award for the best use of OS OpenData register here for the GeoVation Showcase to be held at Ordnance Survey on 4 May.

Crowd-sourced cycling solutions
Cycling levels in the UK are low by continental standards. Despite recent improvements in places such as London and the Cycling Demonstration Towns, cycling remains the exception not the norm. Fast traffic and little space allocated for cycling puts people off.

Yet, as shown abroad, there is huge potential to turn cycling into the pleasant, easy and safe activity that can help transform cities into efficient and wonderful places to live. Conditions need to be improved around the UK if we are to attract new people to start cycling.

Our proposal is for an extensive suite of tools that will assist cycling campaigners around the UK – people who are already enthused – to be more effective in their work. Despite the large scale of the problem, these groups are sadly often poorly-resourced.

Funded by GeoVation, our proposal will provide a powerful but easy-to-use web-based system to resource existing cycling advocacy groups much more effectively, combining the power of geography and the web. It will build on our existing Photomap of over 27,000 locations, bring in resources such as planning applications, collision statistics, and more. Crucially, it will provide resources and workflows specifically designed for the needs of the existing cycling advocacy community.

It will help them collect and catalogue these problems, prioritise them, and watch and respond to potential new problems/opportunities (e.g. planning applications). It will make discussion easier, will involve people who cycle through specific areas, and will focus debates to being solution-based, bringing in best-practice examples more easily.

In short, we want to help turn problems into well-argued solutions, and to help groups work productively with Local Authorities to see these solutions implemented.

Our proposal is backed by groups around the country, including the CTC, London Cycling Campaign and groups from Bristol to Edinburgh, Dublin to Cambridge.

@ccessadvisR

You might not be aware, but there are two transport networks in the UK.  One which 80% of the population can readily use and another, the accessible transport network, which the 10 million people who experience mobility impairments are able to use with greater ease.

The process of planning and making journeys, particularly unfamiliar journeys, can be something of an ordeal for people with mobility impairments.  The main reason is that the smaller accessible transport network is often hidden, with little information to give travellers confidence that accessible transport features exist or work reliably.

Research we (ITP – www.itpworld.net) have undertaken on behalf of the Department for Transport reveals it is common for people with mobility impairments to ‘dry run’ an unfamiliar journey several days before they need to make it in order to reduce the uncertainty and anxiety they experience when making the journey for real.  Many people also piece together information from multiple web-based sources including journey planners, discussion forums, and street maps; placing considerable emphasis on peer-to-peer advice and recommendations.

@ccessadvisr will improve accessible transport information by bringing together disparate sources of pre-journey information on a single website.  We want to present accessible transport information on a map base using a simple set of search tools.  We want to enable a user community of people with limited mobility to rate accessible transport information and infrastructure features at transport stops/stations, on board transport vehicles, at their destinations and on specialised transport services.  A supporting Smartphone app will enable travellers to gather dynamic geo-coded content (images and videos) and blog about the quality of their accessible journey to give other people the confidence to make similar journeys.  We intend to work with UK mobility impairment groups to deliver this innovation and enhance our existing prototype, available at www.accessadvisr.co.uk/.

FixMyTransport – Anywhere!

Problem
It is hard for normal people to get the transport industry to make small and medium sized changes that would improve the travelling experience
It is uncool and scary for most people to become “Transport Campaigners”
It is too hard to register your complaints/wishes when you are actually using public transport.

Solution
A platform that has two distinct functions:
The ability to enable travellers to report small problems directly to transport companies to get them fixed
The ability to coax people who do not think of themselves as ‘activists’ or ‘campaigners’ over the edge into being micro-activists in relation to their own transport problems.
The ability to do both of the above at the location and time of the transport problem.

Work so far
FixMyTransport.com has been in development for a year, is currently in alpha testing. It makes use of NAPTAN, NPTDR and OS Boundaries data to create database of the location of every transport route and stop in the country and linked details of every company and authority that has responsibility for each of these.
The site enables users to swiftly and easily log problems, automatically routing them to the appropriate authority.
Furthermore it provides the tools to enable users to turn their problems into nascent campaigns

What GeoVation will enable
mySociety does not have the resources to develop a mobile application for FixMyTransport, only light re-work of the desktop website version for mobile access
GeoVation will enable the creation of a bespoke, cross-platform mobile application that leverages the inherent geolocation functionality of mobile devices.  In order to succeed the user interface needs to be simple, beautiful, intuitive and swift to use when on the move.

Route en Route. This idea from Matthew Somerville (@Dracos) and Anna Powell-Smith is for a simple, streamlined integrated mobile journey planner.