👋 Hey, I'm Julius. I've been working on open source projects since 2016, with a focus on public transportation. As a part of the "open data" and "civic tech" communities (see also: Code for Germany), most of my work falls into the following two categories:

Advocating for Open Data

I'm convinced that public authorities, especially in the public transportation sector, should release all non-personal data they operate on to the public domain by default. Besides the argument that data which has been payed for with tax money should belong to the public, restrictive data policies also stiffle civic interest and engagement, innovation and ease the formation of monopolies in specific software domains.

I maintain several projects that try to address this in multiple ways:

• For public transportation authorities that don't release data on their own, derhuerst and me built scrapers for internal APIs, exposing them to enable other developers to be creative and make use of that data to build their own services. Examples: oebb, db-prices, flix
• Existing data sources, including those exposed by us as described above, are much more accessible if they expose information in a standardized format. Check out our friendly-public-transport-format
• Data sources are only usable if they are always exposed at the same place. Unfortunately, this is not the case for many public datasets, which is why I maintain: european-transport-feeds, opendata-oepnv

Civic tech and related tools

Of course, I'm also working on projects that make use of the open data I'm advocating for. These include:

• bahn.guru - Non-commercial price search/calendar for German railway (and coach bus) fares
• direkt.bahn.guru - Find all direct connections from your local stop/train station
• transit-map (beta) - Automatically generate schematic transit maps

Check this link for a list of all of my projects.

What do I need money for?

Since I'm working on these projects only in my spare time, as is probably the case for 99,9% of FOSS developers, I mostly need money to cover the operational cost for all of the aforementioned projects. Servers, object storage, uptime monitoring, map tile hosting etc. have become very affordable for companies, but are still a high financial burden for non-commercial developers, since most cloud services' base tier is not priced towards non-profit customers.

Transparency

To provide full transparency, I document all expenses covered by donations here.