Why I’m working on Zephyr
A note from the Chair
The Zephyr Foundation’s mission is to advance rigorous transportation and land use decision-making for the public good by advocating for and supporting improved travel analysis and facilitating its implementation.
I’ve been involved with the Zephyr Foundation for about six months now. I was asked by the Zephyr instigators last summer to chair the Board of Directors that was forming. While it was not entirely clear what I was getting into, I knew the Zephyr instigators shared many of my values from working in the public sector for nearly 15 years. The instigators and I strongly believe that tools built with public resources should be accessible to all and that the transportation planning and modeling community needs to ensure that each practitioner has a minimum set of skills to perform their job competently.
Since I agreed to join the Zephyr Board along with some of the best minds in the transportation modeling and analytical planning field, we’ve come a long way from an idea to a real legal entity. Zephyr was formally established with the State of Virginia in August 2017, and we held our first board meeting at Northwestern University the first week of November.
The 2018 TRB Annual Meeting marked a tremendous turning point for the Zephyr Foundation. We officially went from a group of people soliciting ideas to improve the community to a legal entity with values, a mission, a game plan, a budget, and a set of dues-paying members. Zephyr signed up about two dozen individuals at TRB, and we will be conducting another push in February targeting companies, MPOs, state DOTs, and individuals.
The first official year of Zephyr is going to focus on these three core ideas and tangible goals.
(1) Tool Incubation and Badging: There is clear interest from members and friends that Zephyr should identify projects to take under its wing and incubate or badge as meeting a set of minimum standards for usefulness. The following is a list of projects that have been discussed as either badging or incubation opportunities for Zephyr in 2018.
- Generalized Network Format Specification (GNFS)
- OMX
- NCHRP 852 (Maintain the tool and keep inputs up to date)
- Count Dracula (or similar project)
- ActivitySim
- Fast-Trips
(2 ) Workforce Development: The community wants training, and Zephyr is committing to developing content and providing workshops, tutorials and webinars this year to our members. We still need to more clearly identify what those events look like and start to get them onto the schedule, but they will be rolled-out later this year.
(3) Research Data Platform: A common set of datasets hosted by Zephyr has also caught on with the community. The comparison to the handwriting project in artificial intelligence inspired people to think about a Zephyr hosted research dataset and maybe a common repository for publishing data when papers are published. We’ll need to find organizations or companies to share a dataset or two for the community. The bigger question, What is the challenge to put to the community with these data?
Zephyr may overlap in reach with organizations like TMIP, TFResources, TRB, and the AMPO Research Foundation, but we are being careful not to duplicate. This market is too small for competing factions. We have been in communication this past year with leaders of each of these organizations and I will be talking to the leaders of each of these endeavors over the next couple of weeks to ensure that we find opportunities to collaborate where appropriate.
Finally, we will be going out to hire an executive director and a program manager to lead the day-to-day charge on fundraising and setting up the infrastructure and programs of Zephyr in 2018. The board is holding a board meeting this week, and we’ll have more to share on this process after that meeting.
What can I do?
We are always looking for people who want to get involved and be leaders in our field. Here are a few ways to get involved.
- Propose and idea for Zephyr to lead. Greg Erhardt wrote a piece earlier this month about pitching ideas to Zephyr. Take a look and send us your ideas.
- Lead a project management group. Those projects I was talking about above need committed stewards to bring them to fruition. If you are passionate about these projects, we want to here from you. Look for more information about volunteering soon.
- Become a member or encourage your organization to join. Zephyr needs financial support to make this all happen. To date, Zephyr has been an all-volunteer organization, but these initiatives require paid staff. If you think these ideas are important, please consider joining Zephyr. Need help pitching Zephyr to your organization? Let us know.
- We’re soon to be hiring. If you have what it takes to take these ideas to the next level, I want to hear from you. Keep a look-out for future job postings, and feel free to drop me a note in the meantime.
