Chapter/Belgium/Stories/iRail

In 2009 the Belgian railway company did not have a mobile website. Yeri Tiete (@tuinslak) had just bought his first smartphone, and as a regular train-user, he wanted to check the train schedules. He made a very simple webscraper that would print the result of a simple request in a html table. He informed the Belgian railway company that this might be a good solution and that he had 200 visitors per day without even advertising it.

In June 2010 he got a letter stating that this was copyright infringement. If he would not get this offline, he would get sued. Yeri put this letter online and it didn't take long before he was all over the newspapers. We got in touch with Ywein Van den Brande, an attorney in IP, and sent them a letter back stating that we did not agree. The data is not subjected to any kind of copyright. Since then we've had a few meetings and now they are on the verge of implementing an open data policy their self.

In January 2011 we founded the iRail non-profit organisation. Our community of +/- 30 people are working on a wide variety of projects:
 * An (not yet) inter-modal mobile html5 journey planner: iRail.be
 * An API for accessing public transit data: api.iRail.be
 * A map for visualizing commuters: maps.iRail.be (proof of concept)
 * BeTrains: native mobile applications for a lot of smartphones: http://betrains.com
 * BeLaws.be: a website for accessing the Belgian law
 * The DataTank: a data-adapter. With The DataTank you can put online data in a RESTful interface. It will add business intelligence tools, feedback possibilities, statistics, support for the web of things, ontology linking...
 * We organise events: Apps For Ghent/Leuven/West (inspired by Apps For Amsterdam)

Our non profit organisation has become a living lab. As projects can get successful, people might be able to create spin-offs. We support these spin-offs by offering hosting, support on intellectual property (we keep all project inside the NPO under a fiduciary license agreement. The code-base will be open source) and so forth. This means our focus has been shifting. From public transport to open data in general, toward a living lab. At this moment we want to go back to the basics: public transport.

iRail wants to become part of a bigger organisation which does open knowledge. Some projects are better off to be managed by this organisation (BeLaws, apps for X, The DataTank...). Working together with OKFN for this new organisation, which has the same values and is already known in    Europe, is inevitable, founding a Belgian chapter is a logical consequence.