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The case for a vehicle sharing distribution in Drupal

CEO, Co-Founder
Mar 11, 2015

If we want to prevent a global climate disaster we have to act now! That is what Robin Chase, the cofounder and the first CEO of Zipcar, told us last year at NYCcamp. But she didn’t just give a speech about our impending doom, after pressing the urgency she went on to give a really inspiring talk about the power that we, the Drupal community have to do something about it: we have the tools and the people. Collectively we have proven over and over again that we care about more than just our own profit and Drupal is technologically also a great framework to make the tools that can catalyse global change.

Before I had never believed I could make a significant impact, but now I kept thinking about what I could do to make a difference. A few months after NYCCamp I met Joachim Jacob, a Belgian entrepreneur who wants to build a car sharing company that rents out electric cars. After a few discussions we agreed that it would be a great benefit to have an open source solution in place to help people and organisations better share cars.

By investing in an open source package he would be able to share development costs with other car sharing companies, get better compatibility between services (e.g. imagine a form of “car-roaming”!), decide on core functionality, benefit from features developed by other users, decide on protocols to communicate with car telematics… And last but not least: make it easier for people all around the world to start sharing cars. Car sharing has in most cases a proven positive impact on CO2 emissions.

Car sharing software - and related hardware startups for that matter - are popping up all over the place. But they are in the first place commercial initiatives, with climate impact as a very low secondary priority. Open source initiatives in this field are virtually non-existent. The projects we’ve seen so far are of the “I build my software and then I throw it over the wall” type. None are built with modularity and configurability as a prime design directive. There is often little or no documentation, and it’s not clear what assumptions have been made. I’d like to challenge us: I believe that we, the Drupal community, can do better.

We have the opportunity to shape this discussion, and to build a tool that could make it massively easier to share vehicles. This is a really big opportunity that also makes a lot of business sense. In the enterprise market many companies and governments have car fleets that could be used more efficiently. As a community we already have relationships with this market, we could speed up adoption of such tools, and reduce the amount of cars that are being produced.

What is more, we could build the package with ecological features baked in. For example we could make ‘ride sharing’ a default feature of car sharing companies with an opt-out instead of an opt-in. This alone could significantly lower the ecological footprint of transportation…

So how do we do this? I promised Joachim that I would publish this post on the Drupal Planet, because we need your help. We need a range of founding members that are using different business models, so that we can make sure the package will work in the widest possible set of circumstances.

If you know someone who is starting up a car sharing company, if you are interested in joining the initiative, or if you know someone who is responsible for a car fleet, fill in the following form.

Ideally we could pool together the resources from a few companies to start the development work. With car sharing the complexity is not necessarily in the ride registration, the biggest complexity will be in the interface with the cars, to be able to read out the status of the car and to open and close the vehicle. If you know a maker or a hardware hacker who is interested in this kind of stuff make sure to tell them about our initiative. Together we can make a difference.

Finally, to give you some inspiration, this is the talk Robin gave at NYCcamp.

Kristof Van Tomme is an open source strategist and architect. He is the CEO and co-founder of Pronovix. He’s got a degree in bioengineering and is a regular speaker at conferences in the API, developer relations, and technical writing communities. He is the host of the Developer Success & the Business of APIs and the API Resilience podcasts.

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