Open Mobility Foundation (OMF)

OMF is an open-source software foundation that creates a governance structure around open-source mobility tools, beginning with a focus on the Mobility Data Specification (MDS). By creating an open source foundation, OMF is able to offer a safe, efficient environment for stakeholders including municipalities, companies, technical, privacy, and policy experts, and the public to shape urban mobility management tools that help public agencies accomplish their mobility policy goals. https://www.openmobilityfoundation.org/about/

The OMF was founded to take over governance of the Mobility Data Specification (MDS), that was originally developed by the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. MDS is a specification for API’s to allow for mobility service providers to provide information to government agencies and for government agencies to provide both static and dynamic information (e.g., temporary street closures) to the service providers.

While MDS was originally written to cover shared scooters, it can be used in its current form for other micromobility services as well. One of the goals of the OMF is to explore either expanding the scope of MDS or developing related APIs to cover other shared mobility modes such as TNCs.

In addition to multiple working groups focused on various aspects of MDS, the OMF has recently created a Curb Management Working Group that will work on developing common data definitions and API specifications for digital, geo-coded curb assets, regulations, and occupancy  (https://github.com/openmobilityfoundation/curb-data-specification/wiki). 

In addition, OMF has a Privacy, Security, and Transparency committee that has published an extensive state of the practice inventory on location data privacy and anonymization (Mobility Data State of Practice) and a Privacy Guide for Cities. They are developing a set of privacy principles to guide future work by the foundation. 

OMF has both public and private sector members, however board members must come from the public sector. As of January 2021, their website lists 31 public sector members, most from the United States, but also including non-U.S. members such as Ulm Germany and Bogota, Colombia. They list nine private sector members, including service providers (e.g., Bird), data management organizations (e.g., Ride Report) and others (e.g., Ford Autonomous Vehicles LLC).