Celebrate Trufi’s Informal Transit (Birthday?) With Us

Trufi is many things: an app, an open source code base, an NGO, a community of dedicated volunteers, a state of mind, a love of informal transport in its many forms around the world – not the least of which are the buses in Bolivia colloquially known as trufis.

Depending on when you start counting the days, Trufi is between three and five years old. We’ve decided (informally) to celebrate Trufi’s coming of age – on July 28, 2022. We want to see you there.

A Birthday Is Merely an Orbit; a Transit Is Extraordinary

In astronomy, an orbit is the regular path of an object revolving around another object, attracted by its mass, such as a planet around a star, or a moon around a planet. The earth, you surely know, orbits the sun once every earth year. And that’s how we conventionally mark and celebrate birthdays.

When would we mark Trufi’s birthday? We don’t know.

Would it be April 1, 2019, when the German government gave Trufi Association it’s stamp of approval as an NGO. There was lot going on before then.

Could it be February, 2019 when the first Trufi App, for Cochabamba, Bolivia, was published in the Android App Store? Obviously, the work on the app, and the mapping work in OpenStreetMap preceded that.

If we want to go way back, there’s April 2018, the first time our now president, Christoph Hanser, then living in Bolivia, sent an email to “SIRcode” – now our lead developer, Samuel Rioja – saying, “Hey! Want to work on an app?”

email to Samuel
When Christoph met Samuel

Getting back to astronomy: a transit is when, between two objects, a third object comes into view, passing across the disc. A transit is not as regular or common as an orbit, and not as dramatic as an eclipse. A transit might go unnoticed. (Did you notice the last time Mercury crossed the face of the sun? You probably didn’t. It was in 2019.)

Mercury passing in front of the sun
Mercury passing in front of the sun on Nov. 8, 2006. Photo: NASA

Transits can be exciting, and lead to new discoveries – such as discovering new exoplanets as they pass in front of their distant host stars. Or such as you and Trufi Association discovering each other.

Transit. Get it?

And that’s where this metaphor/double entendre has been going all along. You – the person reading this blog post – somehow discovered Trufi. This unlikely event occurred in spite of all the noise in your information diet over the past three-to-five years. Maybe you were an early supporter, or maybe you just discovered us today when some social media algorithm put Trufi in transit before your eyes. We want you to join us and celebrate that transit – whenever it occured.

What luck! Here’s that button again. It’s like two transits on the same day!

Get Involved – Today

You can register for our celebration (the button above). Use the form below to contact us about volunteering, mapping, public transport, or anything else related to Trufi:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.