[Community Outreach] GTFS amendment process pain points - Your insights count!
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👋 On September 6th 2023, MobilityData will be hosting a 2-part workshop in Valencia, Spain on the amendment process in GTFS. We will ask participants to identify pain points within the formal process as highlighted in changes.md as well as other informal processes that occur. We will then ask the participants to prioritize the pain points and to provide a solution for a single pain point of their choosing.
🤔 Here are some of the topics that might come up:
- Versioning
- Voting
- Implementation
- Testing
- Consumer / Producer proof during testing
- Official Platforms to publish - Should they be mentioned in the process?
📢 Our ask to the community members (you) that won't be able to attend would be to share with us some of their pain points that they would like to highlight for participants to solve. We will be doing something similar in October for the NYC workshops with the goal to open a PR/issue with the proposed solutions.
ℹ️ A pain point can be a process or an item that is missing, too complex, incomplete, too vague, …
🙏 Please provide your pain point using this template:
Name:
Organization:
Producer or Consumer:
Pain point description:
What element of changes.md would it affect:
🗒️ We will be sharing the solutions of the workshops so that you can comment and be kept in the loop. No specification level decisions will be made during the workshops.
Name: Melinda Morang
Organization: Esri
Producer or Consumer: Consumer
Pain point description: There are often a lot of discussions around potential changes, and sometimes the discussions are lengthy and complicated. Monitoring changes to the GTFS spec is a very small part of my job, and it's hard for me to keep up with all the discussions in detail. Most of the time I don't need to actively participate in these discussions. I just need to know the final outcome when changes are actually made to the specification so I can make sure my software works properly with the updates. I would like to see a clear announcement made each time a change is officially adopted with a summary of what the change was and why it was made with a link to the PR for the technical details. Right now I'm subscribed to the gtfs-changes and transit-developers e-mail lists and to this repo, but none of those are really serving my needs. It seems like many changes are not announced to gtfs-changes these days, transit-developers has gone mostly quiet, and the repo itself has far too much detailed discussion. Can we have a low-traffic e-mail list specifically for announcements of official changes that have been adopted?
What element of changes.md would it affect: Items 10: "The final result of the pull request (accepted or abandoned) should be announced on the same Google Groups thread where the pull request was originally announced." There should be a single place the entire community can reliably get an announcement of every official, final change. It is not sufficient to only announce the change in existing threads because not everyone in the community is following the original threads.
@mmorang Thank you for your pain point! I will make sure to share it with the participants. This is something that I have also been reflecting on as community manager. We have recently been publishing blogposts on MobilityData's website as an added layer of communication. I look forward to what the participants will come up with next week.
Name: Weston Shippy
Organization: Trillium/Optibus
Producer or Consumer: Producer
Pain point description: #395
What element of changes.md would it affect: This section could be updated to include a few requirements around disclosing the author's affiliation(s).
@westontrillium Thanks for sharing your painpoint. Unfortunately, the Valencia workshops were held last week, but we will be holding similar ones in NYC on the 16-17th October, we will make sure that this point come up there.
Is there a summary somewhere of what conclusions were reached during the workshop?
@mmorang We can provide some of the conclusions after our NYC workshop to aggregate the whole. Solutions were provided by the groups in Valencia and we hope to revise them in NYC on 16 October.
As we summarize the solutions in the coming weeks, we recommend you visit the following blogposts on the workshops: