Decentralizing Application Production With Wireless Internet Service

Arguably the best thing about having a typical wireless Internet service is the variety of applications one has access to. These applications often take advantage of the wireless capabilities of smart phones to collect and produce data in interesting and important new ways. Recently New York City's Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the government agency that runs all of the city's important public transportation services, announced that it was releasing a huge cache of transportation data to application developers that will hopefully facilitate a new generation of transit applications.

The particularly interesting thing about the MTA's data release is that instead of spending taxpayer money bringing people in-house or hiring specific contractors to develop applications, the agency is relying to some extent on the phenomenon of crowd sourcing instead. Crowd sourcing stems from a sort of philosophy that understands that an agency, organization, or individual who needs a service may not be in the ideal position to identify the best way to source, or find a provider of this service. Therefore, turning to the crowd can be the best way to accomplish a particular task.

In this case, the MTA is hoping to release data to facilitate an application that will be some sort of comprehensive guide to the New York City transportation system. As any New Yorker will tell you, this is quite a formidable task. Sometimes, it seems like the New York City subways are still run by the separate private companies that originally built the lines, so diverse are the schedules. For example, in parts of Brooklyn, a straphanger might need to take one train to get to the East Side of Manhattan on weekdays, another on weekends before 12am, and another for late night service, with this all having been learned by experience since MTA's existing maps only really cover rush hours. MTA knows that as much as its staff are experts on transportation they are not necessarily experts in developing wireless Internet applications and are thus hoping that some savvy developers in New York and elsewhere will be able to use the power of wireless technology to accomplish what the MTA has not been able to do with paper maps and public announcements.

Crowd sourcing is sometimes derided as a form of asking the hive for information, a way of forming an opinion on something based on a kind of unscientific polling rather than by consulting an expert opinion. However, crowd sourcing can also be seen as a way to use wireless Internet service to find experts on a particular subject, as well as a way to communicate with them in a flexible and rapid manner. They say that everyone is an expert on something, no matter how obscure the topic, and one advantage of crowd sourcing is potentially putting many experts on minutiae in touch with people who really need the information, expertise, and in this case technological skills that are being offered.