CarmaHop

This is a copy, phone-number redacted of an email Prino received on 24 January 2015:

Hello Robert,

I hope you are well. We e-met a couple of years ago when I joined Hitchhiki under the name LawrenceOnBoard. I'm still working on our community hitchhiking project in Lawrence, Kansas, and am still out on the road taking rides every week. But the time has come to take the project in a new direction.

Last April I teamed up with Carma Carpooling to develop a smartphone app. Carma is a for-profit company, but they are trying out Lawrence Onboard, now called CarmaHop, as an experiment in a gift economy. It's working extremely well, but we need to make significant updates.

I would like to revise the app to make it a universal tool for anyone who gets in a car with a stranger--that includes hitchhiking and all its variants. It would be extraordinarily helpful for me to get input from the Hitchwiki community to see what their needs and concerns are, with the goal of crafting an app that would make all our journeys safer, easier, better. To that effect, I've put together a short online survey that takes about 5 minutes.

Hitchhiking currently has no voice in the world of transportation policy and planning, unless you count misguided cries to ban it. Projects like CarmaHop, Nederlandlift and GoGoRideshare change that negative image and show that hitchhiking can be a nimble and green mode of transportation.

Would you feel comfortable posting a link to my survey, or allowing me to post on the Hitchwiki website? I've signed on as CarmaHopista, but I believe you have blocked that user name. Here's the link if you'd like to take a look: An App for Riding in Cars with Strangers

Thank you,

Jenny O'Brien
Community Manager
CarmaHop

Lawrence, Kansas

Email: jenny(d)obrien(a)car(d)ma
Phone: 001-785-856-xxxx
Twitter:@CarmaHopista