Modus Cooperandi

Governor Richardson Cooperates

The Albuquerque Tribune reports on the growing use of ITS in New Mexico. This article mentions the key to working ITS: coordination and cooperation. Governor Richardson appears to be unique in his ability to get various agencies to cooperate on transportation issues. His vanity-titled GRIP joins together far-flug regions of the state and adds identifiable coherence to their statewide transportation funding strategy.

Previous high-profile model deployment initiatives also did this.  With names like SmartTrek and AzTech, kitchy though they were, they had marketing appeal. They were something that people could point to and say "Oh, that's because of SmartTrek." MDIs enjoyed a great deal of positive press.

This is increasingly important as people feel more and more isolated from Government in general and defeatist about transportation in particular. Plus, creating identifiable transportation consortiums like this can greatly improve chances for increased federal funding. In short, look serious and people will take you seriously. None of this would be possible without cooperation. 

The model deployment iniatives were based on cooperative ventures.  Public agencies and private corporations had to come together before winning the projects and demonstrate that they could work together.  After the groups demonstrated this, the feds selected four groups that showed the best chance of success.  (They got three out of four right).

This interagency cooperation, birthed by Clinton's reinventing government initiatives, have become more and more the norm.  Efforts like USGS' National Map are great examples of this.  (I'll blog more about the national map later.)  As the future unfolds, agencies leveraging other agencies resources and political momentum will become the norm.  The days of insular government agencies are waning.

Accessibility as a form of cooperation

I spend a good deal of my time working on accessibility issues.  Not wheelchair ramps, but electronic accessibility--how to make technology work for people with disabilities. 

And in the process I have discovered that accessibility is a whole community in and of itself.  I have discovered that even amongst those of us who get paid to work out solutions to make technology work for people with disabilities, there is a great sense of sharing what we come up with.  In some cases more than others, of course, but it seems as though a lot of people seem more focussed on the sense of the greater good.  We shoot things back and forth, try solutions, post questions to newsgroups, share code, share articles, share lots of opinions about what is good, not good, etc. 

What it boils down to for a lot of us is that there is no lock on good technology solutions.  Just because I thought of it doesn't mean someone else won't, and besides, if the goal is to help others, then if I have a good idea, I want to share.  Likewise, if I'm stuck, I'd love it if someone else would share.  And if I have an idea that I think is good but is fatally flawed, I'd sure like to know that too.

In the process of this work, I've built up a network of friends, some disabled, some not.  In the cooperation sense, I have ended up having some fantastic experiences I would never have had otherwise.  I have helped translate a German document to English for a blind friend in India; I've digitally signed an inaccessible document for a blind friend who needed to borrow my eyes to complete the task; I've even read out someone's thoughts who was quadraplegic and couldn't speak clearly.  These same folks have checked my work for me, tested solutions before I say something they wouldn't agree with, let me sound off ideas for clients.  They tell me what they think works, what they hate, how they use assistive technologies and what they would want in an ideal world.

Sometimes each of us needs some help.  Sometimes each of us needs someone to work with us.  Cooperation, collaboration, all part of the grand lesson of kindergarten: sharing is good.

It's CoOperation ...

The MOST Cooperation is an interesting development ... in the past there have been many instances where companies get together to create standards.  Of course there are many others where companies do not collaborate.

The MOST Cooperation, calls themselves a Cooperation, first off.  This implies that the goal is beyond simply making standards that each member can live with - but that they members are actively working together to create a common good.

The MOST Cooperation is creating a plug-and-play environment for all the things in cars that can distract the driver (cell phones, video, audio, laptops, etc.).  It is interesting that they include things like GPS navigation in their device set, but not things like vehicle diagnostics, auto-911 for accidents, proximity detection and other smart vehicle tech.  I would understand if their mission statement provided the groundwork to move in that direction, but started with the low-hanging fruit of in-vehicle entertainment - but I am a bit confused why they isolate the entertainment element of in-vehicle electronics and leave out the mission critical ones.