Locals who use RIPTA know that, despite being torn down in the press, the service does a good job with the limited resources they have. But their website has a glaring weakness - you can't bookmark your specific schedules for easy reference. Instead, users must go to the website, select their route from a LONG drop-down menu and then click "Go" to see their schedule. Three clicks instead of one times tens of thousands of website visitors equals a lot of frustration. 

But now some civic-minded folks have developed a hack called RhodeB.us to do what the RIPTA site doesn't. I find this development significant in several ways, not the least of which is that I now have bookmarks for my route - the  99 - which was at the bottom of that very long drop-down menu.

I recently started a community wiki about Pawtucket and I've been focusing on transportation. (Duh, it's Pawtucket.) Using RhodeB.us, I have links to all Pawtucket bus schedules. That's important, but it's not the most important aspect of this little hack. To me, this is a testament to the power of several active trends, including open source software, hacker/maker culture, direct citizen action and the unique culture of the greater Providence region.

Not to go too far under the hood, but open source software is software the source code of which is publicly available. This movement has created several well-known and widely distributed programs. In this case, the ubiquitous PHP (hypertext preprocessing) web development software used in the RIPTA sitehas facilitated this hack. PHP is fairly simple (as far as programming languages go) and works under some basic standards that have allowed our hackers to enter the site through a side door, if you will.

This hack is entirely benign. Better than that, it's entirely helpful. This is hacker culture at its finest. With expert knowledge and good intentions, programmers with no official capacity to make changes and without the knowledge or permission of RIPTA have vastly improved the usability of the RIPTA website. What's not to like? The term "hacker" may scare you, but not me. 

Citizens, therefore, have taken a direct action and provided a service to their community. For this, RhodeB.us get no reward other than the eternal thanks of anybody who needs to check RIPTA schedules often. They've done it as a civic good. And because THEY THEMSELVES USE RIPTA CONSTANTLY. Citizens taking action to improve the services they use. I'm thinking that's a good thing.

Which leads us to our final trend - the Providence culture. Geeks, hackers, makers, artists, enviro-greens, progressives and all the other subcultures that are so active these days have one thing in common: they (we) LURVE (the greater) Providence (region).  They recognize its shortcomings, but have the knowledge and the capacity to improve things. So they do.

To me, this is shockingly wonderful and a tremendously positive omen for the future. We need to find ways to unleash this power of well-qualified people taking direct action outside the official structure to rapidly and cheaply provide improvements to our infrastructure. It could be a hack for the RIPTA site. It could be a semi-regular citizens clean-up patrol. It could be anything and everything.

Do you have a pet project you'd like to just go ahead and do? Let us know. 

PS. One more time with feeling -- thanks, RhodeB.us. You've done us a solid.

Email (will not be published)

Name

Title

Comment
 remaining characters

Post