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(James) As you’ve heard over the last day and a half, we are moving forward in many important ways – developing data environments, acquiring data sets, focusing on providing the resources to develop key public sector applications but also enabling the development of other mobility applications.

While our first goal is collaboration and building from one another, as we believe this will accelerate the development of new applications, tools, and products, our second goal is to ensure that we optimize the ability to of participants to benefit from the intellectual capital that they will provide. In this respect, we are interested in moving forward based on the principles of open data and open source development. This panel is focused on what we mean by that, what we’ve learned from other public sector endeavors at both the Federal and local levels, and how we plan to support these principles. Our panel represents folks at the cutting edge of this world from a public sector perspective. Our first and last panel member is Randy Butler from the FHWA Office of Operations. Randy is leading the development of the Mobility IntelliDrive Open Source Portal – a key resource for applications development—one of the resources that we have not yet discussed much in this workshop. Randy will start us with the definitions for open data and open source, provided in the context of our programs, and will end the panel by discussing the portal, the data sets, and the test environments as the tools we are providing to enable the efforts we’ve discussed since yesterday.

In between Randy’s presentations, we will hear from two federal staff members who have worked on both open data and open sources initiatives, and a leading expert from a local transportation agency. First, Paul Pisano of FHWA’s Office of Operations will discuss the implications of working with open data environments through the Clarus initiative. Paul will also discuss a recent report on liability that is relevant from a policy perspective as we move forward. Second, we’ll hear from Brian Gardner of FHWA’s Office of Planning and his success with using open source collaboration for research. Third, we’ll hear from Bibiana McHugh, the IT Manager of GIS & Location-Based Services for Tri-Met in Portland Oregon. Bibiana is also the founder of the Transit Forum Network which is designed to facilitate and promote collaboration between transit agencies and developers. Bibiana will speak first-hand about institutional issues with open source software implementations, open source software development, and open data.

Finally, Randy will present on our program tools in support of open data, open data environments, and an open source portal for collaboration in the development of new and innovative dynamic mobility applications.

If you’ll hold your questions to the end, I’ll provide a quick summary and we’ll open it up to questions for the panelists. Randy......

(Randy) We’ve been compiling research on the concepts of open data and open source. There are a number of ways that these terms are defined and used in the real-world. One of the key things that we want to stress is that we are providing our working definitions, and that the input from this workshop and additional efforts will help us clarify our intent in pursuing how we execute open data environments and open source collaboration.

Starting with open data, the concept is to provide data that is available for use without restriction. We are hoping to adopt this definition in our effort to acquire data sets for seeding the open data environment. By allowing the data to be reused without restriction, we believe we’ll stimulate the most innovative thinking about new applications. However, what we don’t know is whether and how much data we can get with this restriction in place.

With regard to open source, we believe that the availability of source code will speed development of new applications. In keeping the source code open, we’ll be able to improve upon it as collaborators contribute improvements back into the environment as well as engage collaborators who would not traditionally be involved.

In applying these concepts to IntelliDrive Mobility, we have identified the need to develop governance; rules of conduct, access, and operations; and to resolve issues associated with privacy, security, data quality, and liability, among other policy issues. These will be addressed further in the discussion of the policy roadmap. For this session, we are looking to provide you with definitions in order to get your thoughts on why this will work or how it might not work.

Let me talk a little about why we are doing this and how we plan to implement it. I think our objective is evident to those who have pursued open data/ open source before. If done right, we provide ourselves with cost savings, faster development time, and more robust products. Additionally, we – meaning all of us and users and consumers – benefit from new and innovative applications that are open and can be used anywhere, at any time.

So, to do this right, we need to think about how we use licenses, how we acquire data and code, and how we ensure the use of ITS standards. The important points for each of these, we think, are listed on this slide: getting the balance right with regard to rights and licenses, ensuring that there are no or limited (for good purpose) restrictions on any data that will reside in these environments, and getting agreement on the use of ITS standards.

The following presentations will address some of these issues, and we want to hear your thoughts on these subjects after the presentations. Before we move on, I want to highlight some of our initial analysis.

With that in the background, the rest of our panel presenters will discuss how Open Data and/or Open Source has worked for their programs and agencies.