The Open Mobility Foundation: getting fifty people to work as one team

From December 2019 to April 2020 I worked in operations at the Open Mobility Foundation. The foundation is a non-profit formed by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation to administer the open-source Mobility Data Specification.

I was its second employee.

The specification already had collaboration groups: about 50 people from various organizations. My job was to get them working together as a team. I established a common language, a release cadence, tools and shared working spaces.

Most of the work was possible because the project was fully transparent. It ran on public GitHub resources, where anyone could see what was proposed and what was decided.

The Mobility Data Specification lets cities and mobility companies exchange data about shared vehicles, so public agencies can regulate the right of way.