Title of your hackathon challenge
Mobile client for ridesharing with Skjutsgruppen and other forms of green travel
Describe your company or organisation
Skjutsgruppen is a non-profit ridesharing movement who either shares equally or offer rides for free. During 2014 we cooperated with over 20 municipalities, started 200 ridesharing groups and offered 1,5 million ridesharing kilometers. The purpose of our non-profit organization is to promote all forms of common and environmentally friendly ways to travel. On our website you can read more about the movement, how we started and why we do what we do (in Swedish): http://skjutsgruppen.nu/about_us
You can also watch this video about the participatory culture in Skjutsgruppen
and read our annual review (both in Swedish).
Describe your challenge
Skjutsgruppen began as a social media movement in 2007 on Facebook and Twitter. The group grew very rapidly with thousands of users and the movement now has over 60 000 users throughout Sweden and Europe. With so many active users we realized in 2012 that we needed to build a web service with associated maps and search tools. In the months that followed we managed to collect the 200 000 SEK that the web service would cost via crowdfunding. Many of our users together gave 10 SEK or more and we received gifts from various sponsors.
In the same way, we involved the movement in the actual construction of the service, where everyone who wanted to join in was welcome to give input on everything from design to functionality. More than 70 volunteers chose to dedicate extra time in a reference group, which in various ways helped in the construction. These “Skjutsgruppen Heroes” are still active and the group has been expanded with more enthusiastic volunteers, including programmers who develop services based on our open API, for free and in favor of the movement.
Today, one of the most common improvement requests in the Skjutsgruppen movement is to be able to search for and offer rides through a mobile client. There is an existing Android client, but it hasn’t been updated for a long time.
The challenge we want to give to the Green Hackathon participants is therefore to improve or build a new mobile client for the Skjutsgruppen ridesharing web service, either by extending the existing Android client or making a new multiplatform application based on Apache Cordova. The solution should take into account that the app should be translatable into different languages.
What kind of data and facts can you offer the team to solve the challenge?
Skjutsgruppen API documentation and code for a Skjutsgruppen Android app on www.github.com/skjutsgruppen
What kind of solutions are you looking for?
We believe that increased use of the Skjutsgruppen ridesharing system would give obvious positive effects on sustainability.
Since the search functionality on the website www.skjutsgruppen.nu also shows the users public transportation options through the open API:s from Trafiklab (found on www.trafiklab.se/api) it would be preferable if the mobile client also would include that, as we want to promote all forms of green travel.
Especially interesting would be just-in-time type applications i.e. the ride requester stands on a bus stop and can see approaching vehicles offering rides.
How are you planning to take the best solutions further after the hackathon?
The best solutions from the hackathon will be presented to our group of “Skjutsgruppen Heroes” – a group that you of course also would be welcome to join! We will together investigate if and how we could integrate the developed solutions into our existing code base to be able to offer new enhanced services. If you share our belief in openness and sharing, we could also publish the new code open source in our GitHub repository.
If we believe that a solution has great potential for further improvement, the winners could also be part of seeking financial assistance for putting more development time into improving the mobile client further.
Name and contact info the teams can contact regarding the challenge
Pernilla Näsfors, pernillan[at]gmail.com, 070-308 08 96, Twitter: @pernillan
