TravelSpirit North America aims to unite the innovation and entrepreneurial efforts of North American cities and companies with the thought leadership and core values of the global TravelSpirit network, bringing us ever closer to a worldwide Internet of Mobility.
TS North America Board Roster
Priority Initiatives
Coordinated Open Source Transport Technology Governance.
A robust ecosystem of open source tools for transportation and mobility provides a pathway for new service-based businesses. Rather than trying to compete on all fronts (eg: who can write the best routing algorithm) in an open source community everyone works towards creating the best solution and competing in an open market by providing the best service.
There are presently open source alternatives for most software aspects of the transportation ecosystem, ranging from successful to fledgling. Each of these tools, no matter how brilliant and potentially game changing, face a challenging and hostile environment that can impede the marketing and ongoing development necessary to build a robust user base. These challenges can be overcome through coordinated governance and asset management, and advocacy for shifting industry standard practices in procurement and project evaluation.
We aim to energize North America’s robust open source development ecosystem towards further development and adoption of an open source MaaS toolset.
Expanded Open Innovation Program.
TravelSpirit designed the Open Innovation Program to accelerate novel approaches to transport challenges. But unlike a corporate sponsored hackathon, which often function to lock-up innovation and IP through a sort of crowd-sourced low-cost R&D program, the hackout framework is intended to leverage open source and open data assets and contribute back to that ecosystem.
We are seeking public and private partners in cities to bring the Open Innovation Program to North America.
MaaS Readiness for US Cities.
As interest in Mobility as a Service (MaaS) has grown, many governments are asking what they need to do to bring MaaS to their cities. TravelSpirit developed the Index of Openness last year to help cities prepare for integrated MaaS. Taking that work a step further, the MaaSLab at UCL launched a more comprehensive MaaS Maturity Index.
We are seeking new partner cities and regions in North America with interest in applying the MaaS Readiness Index and Index of Openness.
Blockchain / DLT incubation for Transportation Sector.
Blockchain technology has the potential to rapidly expand integration across the mobility sector, bringing the Internet of Mobility ever closer to reality. For example, users of mobility services must create individual profiles that are tethered to individual service providers, causing friction between multiple modes of transit and stages of itinerary, while on the enterprise side, the reliance of travel and mobility service providers on centralized databases leads to low interoperability and high data security and compliance costs. Blockchain could provide users with full access control over their data while relieving service providers of the necessity to re-create and manage end user profiles.
To date, TravelSpirit Foundation have collaborated with Iconic Blockchain and the UK Transport Systems Catapult on pioneering white papers on this exciting new technology frontier; the TSio Protocol and Blockchain Disruption in Transport – Are you Decentralised Yet?
We are building capacity within the blockchain enthusiast and development community in North America to develop and test applications that solve challenges in the transport and mobility space.
Automotive Industry Engagement.
The transition to shared mobility services will have a profoundly disruptive impact on the entire automotive ecosystem, including manufacturing, insurance, servicing and dealerships. These are significant industries in North America.
We seek to work with the North American automotive industry to identify the areas of opportunity within the changing mobility landscape.
Ongoing Communications and Publications
We are working on our first publication intended to bring clarity to the various terminology of the New Mobility ecosystem, including MaaS, MOD, IoM, NMS and others.
This is particularly important within the context of North America, where MaaS is less understood and often interchanged with the term Mobility On Demand (MOD).