FAQS

The Open Mobility Foundation’s mission is to transform the way cities manage transportation infrastructure in the modern era using well-designed, open-source technology.

The OMF is founded on a core set of principles, which you can view here.

Transparent Governance for Public Benefit: The Open Mobility Foundation convenes a new kind of public-private forum to seed new ideas. OMF’s unique leadership structure also enables it to transparently govern and evolve MDS to provide the highest benefit to the largest number of people, from sustainability to privacy-protective measures to safety outcomes.

Collaboration: OMF offers a collaborative environment for municipalities, civic nonprofits, corporate stakeholders, subject experts, and the public to work together in order to solve emerging transportation challenges that affect communities across the country, such as ensuring safety, equity, protection of individual data and quality of life.

A Playbook for Innovation: Private companies scale best when cities can offer a consistent playbook for innovation. Already in use in over 50 cities, MDS provides a consistent set of standards for public agencies and mobility providers to communicate digitally, improving the outcomes for cities, users, and companies across the country.

Better Urban Transportation Outcomes: Most importantly, by providing open access to cutting-edge digital tools, the OMF enables increased convenience, sustainability, new business opportunities, and more options for affordable transportation – ideally allowing every resident to access all the transportation services a city offers.

Cities are accountable to the public, and have an interest in making sure that their residents are being served in a way that is safe and equitable, and improves their quality of life while protecting individuals’ privacy rights. With new challenges and new tools around mobility technology emerging in cities across the country, municipalities are well-positioned to collaborate and convene stakeholders in order to find technology solutions that serve the public good.

The leadership of the Open Mobility Foundation consists of the Board of Directors and an Executive Director that work with all our members and contributors to ensure that the vision and mission of the Foundation are fulfilled.

The founding municipal members of the coalition are Austin, Bogotá, Chicago, Los Angeles, Louisville, Miami, Miami Dade, Minneapolis, New York City DOT, New York City Taxi and Limo Commission, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica, Seattle, and Washington DC. Other municipal members will be solicited throughout the life of the Foundation.

In addition to cities and public agencies, the Open Mobility Foundation is founded in part by The Rockefeller Foundation — a premier science-driven philanthropy focused on promoting the well-being of humanity throughout the world.

The Foundation is governed by a Board of Directors that consists of public entities that are responsible for managing the public right-of-way. This allows cities both ownership and authority over the strategic and operational aspects of the Foundation. The Foundation is structured so that all members, including Public members, Non-Public members (such as commercial organizations and nonprofit partners), may contribute to projects or be appointed as a liaison to a committee. The OMF’s approach to projects is described in more detail below.

The Open Mobility Foundation recognizes the importance of harnessing the  global community of researchers and academic institutions to address the transportation and mobility priorities facing cities.

The Foundation is a global organization – the challenges facing cities today are not limited by national borders. We continue to see tremendous interest from cities around the world in both the Open Mobility Foundation and MDS.

The Open Mobility Foundation is a 501c6 non-profit membership organization, funded by member dues and philanthropic support. Commercial members pay annual dues to the Open Mobility Foundation, which vary by company size (measured by number of full time employees) and selected membership level. Download the current dues schedule to learn more about membership levels. The OMF has also received funding from the Rockefeller and Knight Foundations as part of their ongoing work to support communities and advance equity, sustainability, and safety. The OMF is legally organized as a subsidiary of OASIS Open, but is independently governed, funded, and operated.

As an open source organization serving the public sector, we believe it is essential for our work to be done in a manner that is transparent, participatory, and inclusive. Although we are a membership organization, most of our working group meetings are open for anyone to attend and participate. All of our technical work takes place in public GitHub repositories where technical decisions are discussed and documented. As of August 2021, once approved, minutes from our Board of Directors meetings are published here. Additional details about our governance structure and committee members can be found in our governance repository on GitHub.

As an open-source software foundation, the Open Mobility Foundation welcomes a variety of methods of participation and contribution. Interested individuals can become Contributors, who participate in activities like software development or working in committees that focus on issues related to the Open Mobility Foundation’s mission.

To become a Contributor, an individual reviews and signs the Contributor Guidelines. These guidelines ensures that Contributors abide by the OMF Bylaws, the OMF Code of Conduct, and ensures that the work contributed to OMF by an individual can be redistributed as open source code, or as documents that can be used by others.

While the OMF board has ultimate authority on all tools, processes, and projects that are part of the Foundation, Contributors may submit, create, review, or edit any software, documentation, and test cases under the Foundation’s purview.

Everything that Contributors develop or contribute is licensed under a permissive, free license.  For code and API definitions contributions are licensed under the terms of the Apache 2.0 Software License.   For documents, contributions are licensed under the terms of the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license.

Please visit our Get in Touch page on our website for more details.

Please visit our Get in Touch page on our website for more information.

Please visit our Get in Touch page on our website for more information.

The Open Mobility Foundation is about more than just scooters. Whether because of the growth of popularity of online shopping and on-demand food delivery, or the introduction of new modes such as shared scooters, the number and type of vehicles using the existing public right-of-way continues to rise in cities across the country.

The Open Mobility Foundation supports the development and broad deployment of a common, open-source software platform that allows cities to fulfill their multiple responsibilities for safety, limiting congestion, promoting commerce, ensuring the protection of individual data, and improving the quality of life in age of digitally-driven transport.

Open source is an approach to software that allows for universal access to a tool or product’s design, blueprint, or code. The goal in taking this approach is to share tools, spur innovation, and encourage feedback so that a wide range of stakeholders and providers can work together to improve the source code and collectively create changes within a software community.

The Open Mobility Foundation is an open source software foundation, similar to established foundations such as the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, and the OpenStack Foundation. The primary objective of an open-source foundation is to provide a safe, open, efficient environment for people to come together to solve problems by building free software.

An open-source foundation enables a city-led approach to the development and deployment of open-source software platforms that provide cities with information, technology and capability to fulfill their responsibilities of improvement of safety, minimization of congestion, promotion of commerce, and improvement of residents’ quality of life.

The Foundation also creates partnership with private and nonprofit entities, in a way that establishes checks and balances to develop open-source software solutions to address the common challenges that all cities face. An open-source foundation also provides structure and transparency through consistent policies for community collaboration, modification, documentation, intellectual property, and licensing.

More than 115 cities across the United States — including dozens across the globe — already use MDS to manage micro-mobility services.

Like MDS, the General Bikeshare Feed Specification (GBFS) is an open standard for expressing data about shared mobility vehicles operating in the public realm. In fact, any operator that fully complies with MDS is, per the MDS specification, also required to publish a public GBFS feed.

But while MDS and GBFS are similar, they serve two different purposes. GBFS is intended for public consumption through consumer-facing applications. MDS provides regulators in city government with authenticated, private access to data that is not meant to be made public.

To learn more about the similarities and differences of MDS and GBFS, read our brief guide.