Why Joby Aviation joined the Urban Computing Foundation

At Joby Aviation, we are building an aerial ridesharing service powered by our electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. We want to save a billion people an hour a day by making travel faster and easier while reducing the impact of human mobility on the environment.

In pursuit of our goal, we use and contribute to a variety of open-source software tools to assist with data visualization, airspace analysis and market development. These are tools that empower us to draw key insights about urban mobility and tell our story in a compelling, data-driven way.

We are strong believers in the power of open-source to drive progress toward building better cities and mobility systems. It’s important for these tools to be available to a diverse set of researchers and organizations working toward goals similar to our own, amplifying the many voices working to improve cities and communities around the world.

Last month, Joby joined the Urban Computing Foundation. UCF is a project of The Linux Foundation® dedicated to connecting developers, data scientists, and engineers who are building software that enables cities to be smarter and more connected.

With many public and private organizations working toward the goal of building smarter cities, the existence of open-source software tools is vital to ensuring compatibility, transparency, and continued progress in urban computing.

That’s where UCF comes in. Through the program’s neutral governance structure, users of these open-source tools can share responsibility for upkeep, maintenance, and further evolution of the software libraries that drive their work to improve urban systems. This open structure also creates transparency, allowing public visibility into the code base, and guarantees that member organizations can participate in key technology development decisions.

Chris Gervang, a Data Visualization Engineer at Joby, plays an important role in this community, having developed and maintained hubble.gl — a tool that enables people to create data-driven video renderings without the need for highly-specialized coding expertise. At Joby, this tool plays a key role in helping communities and stakeholders understand how our service could work in the future by simulating maps that demonstrate traffic flows across metropolitan regions.

As a company, we strive to be responsible, contributing members of the communities in which we operate. We’re pleased to join UCF as a member company, formalizing our commitment to the upkeep and governance of open-source software tools we believe are critical to building smarter cities.