Jason Hibbets had a brief conference call with Chris Osgood and Nigel Jacob from New Urban Mechanics (Boston) on Tuesday, December 9. Here are some notes from that conversation:

• Where's my school bus authentication: Parents last name, student ID, student date of birth — little to no issues with security
• The project was piloted with three groups for the beta: 1) a k-8 school, 2) special education committee, 3) Greater Boston school admins
• GPS vendor is Zonar - http://www.zonarsystems.com/
• The service is hosted in the cloud on heroku with an integration to the Zonar API
• Routes - bus routes are not in the system, the app only shows the current location of the bus (via bus numbers—which causes issues sometime if buses are in the shop)

Next steps - trying to meet with Wake County Public School System communications director and other stakeholders from transportation

Posted on Wed 10 Dec 2014 09:03:18 PM EST by Jason Hibbets