With (((eTicket Deutschland, all participants have a say. Regardless of whether they are a small local business or a supra-regional network: everyone can apply for changes to the ticketing standard and everyone can vote on the desired changes. At the annual participants' meeting in Cologne. It was that time again on 18 May.
Ten years of the Participants' Assembly
The (((eTicket Deutschland Participants' Assembly celebrated its tenth birthday in May 2022: In the second quarter of 2012, we invited (((eTicket Germany participants to Cologne for the first time to vote on changes to the standard. At that time, representatives from around 140 companies attended. Today, more than 470 transport companies and associations took part and their representatives met on 18 May at the Hotel Mondial in Cologne.
Another difference: while the representatives of the industry were still voting on amendments and the like using coloured paper ballot papers back then, today this is done online. Without collecting slips of paper, analysing votes and, in case of doubt, recounting them several times.
What happens at a participants' meeting?
At (((eTicket Deutschland, grassroots democracy prevails: all participating transport companies and alliances can submit suggestions for improvements to the VDV core application and (((etiCORE. These are known as change requests.
The participants in (((eTicket Deutschland vote on these submitted change requests, which are reviewed by the Standardisation Working Group (AG-S), once a year.
At the upcoming participants' meeting, those present will be able to decide on 20 change requests.
We distinguish between three different types of change requests.
These change requests are used for detailing and thus improving the understanding of the specification content.
These CRs concern the correction of errors in the (((eTicket systems that affect individual participants. These CRs must be implemented by the companies concerned.
The service enhancements are initially CRs that can be implemented voluntarily. However, these optional functional enhancements may become mandatory in subsequent versions of the EFM standard.
How the distribution of voting rights works
We thought long and hard about how we wanted to weight the voting shares: should the transport companies with the highest turnover also have the greatest voting rights? Or the ones with the most vehicles of their own? The ones with the highest passenger volume? Ultimately, we decided that those who invest a lot in the digital distribution system also need a lot of co-determination rights. After all, they also have the greatest burden when it comes to changes to the standard.
We have therefore linked the number of votes to the number of user media issued (e.g. chip cards) and the number of Secure Application Modules (SAMs, one of which is installed in each (((eTicket terminal (e.g. bus printer, ticket machine, tachograph)):
- Service providers with fewer than 50 SAMs receive one vote
- Service providers with 51 to 151 SAMs receive two votes
- Service providers who use more than 2500 SAMs receive 20 votes
- Customer contract partners and product managers with up to 50,000 SAMs also receive one vote
- KVP and PV with up to 100,000 SAMS have two votes
- CIPs with up to 250,000 SAMs receive five votes
- CIPs with more than one million active SAMs have 20 votes
Product owners with up to 300,000 SAMS have seven votes and all those with more than 300,000 SAMS have eight votes, which they can cast in favour of or against a change.
If a transport company is both a customer contract partner and a service provider, the most-favoured-nation principle applies: for example, if the company has 400 SAMS (5 votes) and 100,000 user media (2 votes), it has five votes at the participants' meeting.
To accept or reject a CR, a three-quarters majority of votes is required at the participants' meeting. Incidentally, the participants in (((eTicket Deutschland are generally in agreement.
This is how we prepare ourselves - and the participants
We officially invite our participants at least six weeks before the meeting and send them a draft resolution with the change requests to be voted on at the meeting. This gives the companies and alliances sufficient time to discuss the optimisation proposals internally.
In addition, we offer a digital workshop around four weeks before the participants' meeting in which all change requests are presented and explained in detail: what specifically is to change and what does this mean in technical terms? This gives participants the opportunity to ask very specific questions in advance and helps us to adapt the documents for the meeting accordingly.
11th participants' meeting: the result
The participants in (((eTicket Deutschland voted on the proposed changes to the ticketing standard on 18 May: Two CRs to abolish blocking reasons were rejected, all others have been accepted.
We are now integrating the approved updates to the VDV core application into the (((eTicket standard. We will make release 1.11.0 available to our participants in the ASM tool as soon as possible.