LTA - first government agency to engage developers?

LTA seems to be sincere in trying to engage the development community to find out how best they can help to empower developers to build more mobile apps around their dataset.

Last week I was asked to come down for a meeting with LTA apparently to discuss about my old android app, Traffic@SG.

Today, I met two of the engineers and we had a short chat about how the app work and what problems I’ve encountered. It turns out that LTA is currently calling up app developers who have used their dataset via Project Nimbus to meet them individually to find out more about what they are doing.

LTA says that they are interested in engaging the community and to find out more about how they can improve their dataset as well as to introduce and register developers into their database.

Apparently from my understanding, you have to be a registered developer to get access to their full dataset, regardless if you were linked up via. Project Nimbus.

All in all, while more red tape has been added, it does appear, at least to me, that LTA is quite sincere about their intentions and have even followed up with me to help me with the registration process as well as technical help. They also made use of this chance to talk a little bit more about their $50M Land Transport Innovation Fund (LTIF) which developers and startups can apply to for their transport-related projects.

I’m not sure why LTA requires that in order to apply, you must not have started on the project yet. It seems that this would almost immediately eliminate the real startups right from the start.

Will this last, I don’t know, but it is definitely a step in the right direction when government agencies are beginning to push their datasets out and encourage developers to build apps with it. I look forward to being able to pull more data from other agencies as well.