Exciting things coming for Citybikes

I am happy to write here that I am starting on a Commons Fund project with NLnet to scale up and develop CityBikes!

While writing this post, I just realized I have barely talked here about the project. So here’s a quick summary on how it started and were we are at the moment.

I started this project back in 2009 when I wanted to build a FOSS android app for the local bike sharing system in my city. I discovered that the information was not publicly available. I first created openBicing, an android app for the local bike sharing system in Barcelona, together with a public API to access the information. Soon I discovered this was not just a local issue, but something that was happening to other cities too, so I created CityBikes with the goal of solving this problem once and for everyone.

What started with an app, made me aware of the importance of open access information compared to visualizations. Data acts as an enabler of creativity, research, transparency and advancement. Representations provide immediate value, but are constrained to a single purpose.

This made me focus all my efforts into the API and pybikes, leaving aside the (popular at the time) android app. Maybe a regrettable decision, since I lost the only revenue channel I had (donations through an app) but also has proven a success in terms of what open data can accomplish. There is an app using the CityBikes API for every platform you can build apps on: not only iOS or Android, but less known platforms too like the pebble, fitbit, telegram bots, Home Assistant, among others.

Over the years, the API has seen considerable increase in usage, and pybikes has attracted a fair number of contributions. All this has been happening organically, and the time I have directed to the project has been very dependent on my free time and excitement and engagement with what I do. As most of everyone that know me know, it’s also been frustrating at times. Spending time monitoring usage of the API to learn that well funded companies are using Citybikes for their projects with zero regards into contributing back either with code or by covering infra costs — I never signed up for that, and it’s not how I like using my free time and my energy tokens.

So what is coming? I like to think that Nlnet is funding me with more time and energy tokens to invest on the project, and hope I will have more things to write here about it. That’s a bit of an empty promise, blogs being blogs, but will see where we go from here.

Onwards! (rip Geoff).