Zephyr Foundation through Ohio DOT
Helping launch an open-source home for the travel forecasting community so public agencies and practitioners could share code, governance, and learning rather than repeatedly solving the same problems alone.
- Role
- Founder and open-source governance lead through an Ohio DOT contract
- Period
- 2015 onward
- Organizations
- Ohio Department of Transportation · Zephyr Foundation · Travel forecasting community
UrbanLabs’ early work with Ohio DOT focused on building an online code repository and shared home for the travel forecasting community. The contract language framed the need clearly: practitioners were reusing similar CT-RAMP code across regions, but without a common open repository it was difficult to share fixes, methods, and model files in a way that saved public money and reduced duplicated effort.
That effort helped create the conditions for what became the Zephyr Foundation: a community-centered home for open-source transportation analysis work, learning sessions, and governance that could outlast any single contract or agency.
What makes this experience important to UrbanLabs is not just the software. It showed that technical infrastructure for public-interest work also needs social infrastructure: stewardship, governance, onboarding, and a place where people can learn from one another. That combination of human connection and practical innovation is central to the UrbanLabs idea of both “urban” and “labs.”
Why it matters
This work sits close to the heart of UrbanLabs. It treated community need, workforce development, and public stewardship as first-order design constraints, and it used open-source governance as a practical way to help transportation professionals learn together and build better tools.