A few months ago, I did a short interview for the Engadget Show on the state of real-time bus information here in NYC.  The interview was for a video segment which led into a live interview with the reporter I worked with, Rick Karr.  The whole episode is now available online.  Before our section is an interview with Nicholas Negroponte, talking about OLPC and visions for the future.

35 min into the show is our part.  We’re standing right outside of Penn Station, checking out the real-time bus information that’s available now on 34th Street via dynamic signage.  We talk a bit about the current state of real-time on NYC buses and the challenges that the MTA has faced getting real-time implemented thus far.  In the live interview, Rick mentioned some of the work we’ve been doing at The Open Planning Project, including the iPhone-based OpenBusTracker experiment we did last summer, and our general belief that real-time can be implemented for less than you’d expect using commodity hardware and open source software.

Of course, it’s tough to watch yourself on video, and it’s even tougher to hear your own edited answers.  Note to self: work on snappier soundbites!  But it was really fun doing the interview, and great to get the real-time transit discussion out there to a wider audience.

I had a great crowdsourcing experience yesterday.

Here at TOPP Labs, we’re doing a 6-month check-in on our annual employee reviews.  What that means for me is a 30-minute interview with each of the folks on my team (about 20 in total), where we look back on the past six months to see how we’re doing re: professional goals outlined in the annual reviews.  So, today and Monday, I’ll be having 20 30-minute meetings, each followed by 15-minutes of write-up time by me.  That’s kind of a lot to schedule.

Here’s how it went down:

1) First, I cleared my schedule for today and Monday.

2) “Hmm, I guess I need to ping each person to see when they can meet up.  Ugh.  Time to procrastinate.”

3) “Since I’m out of the office today, it will be super annoying to email every single person from my phone.  I’ll just write one email to the team list and have each person email me back times that work for them.  Nice.  Offloading the work.”

4) “Wait!  Even better, I’ll just ask everyone to add their own appointments to the team Google Calendar.  Now we’re talking.”

So in the end, I just had everyone schedule their own meetings on a first come, first served basis.  Kind of empowering to just let other people schedule two whole days for me.  Plus, the communication overhead went from a lot to zero.  Yay for crowdsourcing.