eneidaraya's blog

Transport for NSW (TfNSW) holds several innovation challenges, which are open to the public throughout the year, in order to find innovative solutions for real world customer problems. Our innovation challenges vary from helping boaters navigate safely on our waterways, to digitising the paper based log book for learner drivers, or helping keep our clearways stay clear. Ideas and solutions come from a variety of industries and backgrounds, bringing new perspectives to the table.

In the last decade, we have seen open data policies geared at making open data transparent, accessible and available to the public. Today, we are seeing improved access to open data across the globe, giving organisations opportunities to innovate and solve problems. We can track our public transport in real time, find out which car park has available spots, and know more about our greenhouse gas emissions.

We, the Open Data and Innovation team, have hosted many innovation challenges over the last few years, and have seen some great pitches. We are often asked what makes a good pitch. After all, you have only five minutes to explain your product and convince the judges that your product or idea is the most compelling. Here are our top tips to help you deliver an effective pitch.

For the last blog post in our 3-part series on OpenStreetMap (OSM), we would like to focus on what the future of TfNSW’s Trip Planner might be if we harnessed the power of OSM. Trip Planner has already embraced several recent changes (see post Changes and New Features in the TfNSW Trip Planner, such as offering mix modes of transportation to allow more tailored results.

As outlined in our previous blog post, OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, editable map of the whole world that is being put together by contributors. The data from OSM is freely available for visualisation, query, download, and modification under open-content license. It provides a high level of detail and accuracy that can rival other map offerings, which at times can make it fairly complex to use.