The intent of the City Car Share project is to provide an open-source (GPL) software system that automates much of the car sharing process. We hope to create a primarily (but not exclusively) web-based system which allows the scheduling and reservation of shared vehicles. The system will be able to scale down to a neighborhood (or even a city block-sized) community, and up through to multiple, large metropolitan areas hosted on a single system.

From a technical perspective, our goal is to reduce the technical requirements on a hosting organization to allow easier adoption and maintenance. The system will require internationalization support, as we expect developing economies to be key beneficiaries of a simple, cheap car sharing system.

Primary softwares used by the CCS project are:

• PostgreSQL.
• Jakarta Tomcat 4.
• Jakarta Struts.
• CVS.
• JUnit.
• Doug Lea's Concurrency library.

Also, as future integration with non-HTML/HTTP reservation methods is expected, some future aspects of the project may involve web services (SOAP) or wireless protocols (WAP) or the like. These are not expected to be part of the initial release.

If the development of the City Car Share project is successful, sfcarshare.org, a San Francisco-based non-profit with over a thousand active members, to be the first production user.

But to be truly successful, we want to be able to fundamentally alter the way vehicles are used in urban areas, improving the lives of city-dwellers around the world through better use of technology and our natural and human resources.