I'm not going to tell you bike sharing is a super-important part of the economy or something business strategists need to stay awake at night worrying about. That said, it's important for those for whom it's important – if you see what I mean. And if the spread of technology has done anything, it's empowered people to bring efficiency to the activities they care about.
But I do want to offer what's happening in bike sharing as an example of the changed expectations I'm seeing in business, government, and social media. Bike sharing in the US is adopting data standards: “The North American Bikeshare Association, working with representatives from the largest bike manufacturers, owners and operators in North America, is happy to announce the adoption of the open data standard for bikeshare. The open data standards will make real-time data feeds publicly available online in a uniform format so that map and transportation based apps such as Google Maps, RideScout and Transit App can easily incorporate this data into their platforms.”
Parse this statement and what do you see? First, you've got an industry association working on behalf of everyone with a stake in bike sharing. Second, you've got openness to applications and organizations that might want to use the data. Taken together, this represents a default assumption that people need to share data. This is a big shift in our culture. People now acknowledge they're part of a bigger reality. Isolation is now unusual and unnatural. The benefits of sharing data across a community are so obvious they barely need stating.
Some enterprises are still to catch on with this way of thinking. Tradition and legacy structures hold them back – it's not their people, who are regular folks like you and me: people who appreciate data as a value in itself. Bikes
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