Calling for an Open 311 in NYC

there ought to be a dashboard, maybe a tag cloud, of topics that people are "currently inquiring about" - this could be part of an open 311 or added onto a web interface to the existing one.

advantages?: helps broadcast that they are taking information about hot topics (which might help manage peak loads) and also helps crowds converge on names for evolving issues. that way inbound tickets aggregate around topics instead of getting diffused into 1000 different pre-defined categories that fail to generate enough to take action on.

sorry if this is a little incoherent but at the end of an extremely long day evangelizing DIYcity, Breakout, co-working and all the other bottom-up urban goodness in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

I left a comment elsewhere on the site about what I think a crowd-sourced 311 for every city could be; http://diycity.org/discussions/diycity-challenge-6-special-challenge#com...

I can see a clear solution in my head for this and it is the kind of thing I am going to do for myself. It is simple and quick to launch.

Okay, summing up what we have so far for everyone out there, I get this:

Open 311 should:

- open up the city's live data (i.e. non-sensitive realtime data, from city agencies, services etc) and make it accessible to everyone for remix and reuse.

- be standardized across cities (from paulmwatson). advantage: allows anyone stepping off the plane from anywhere in the world to instantly plug in to the system.

- include feedback from the system as to what others are currently inquiring about (from Anthony Townsend). advantage: helps the public and the gov converge on trending topics, identify these issues quickly, and exchange info on them.

- involve mapping of data (from marissagregory). advantage: gives a more comprehensive understanding of city dynamics. city and public gains the value of user-generated information at the city level

- open the door to easy interaction with organizations such as Wastematch.org which exist to make the city better. (from marissagregory)

What else?

What else would an open 311 in NYC look like?

Why would this be better than the current 311 system?

Is this a game changer for NYC? For Bloomberg?

Your input is greatly appreciated.

The above features are fantastic, but we don't need to ask the city to program them all. All the city really needs to do is provide an API into the existing 311 ticketing system. Once the API is built with maybe a simple bare bones reference implementation, any number of companies or individuals could build their own apps with the monitoring and mapping features that we really want for all the platforms out there.

The API would really only need four basic pieces of functionality:

1 - Report a problem
Inputs: Lat/Long, Photo of Problem, Description of Problem, Severity of Problem, Problem Category, Confidentiality Flag
Return: Error with Error Message or Success with Issue Number

2 - Look up details of a specific issue
Input: Issue Number
Output: Lat/Long of issue, Comments by 311 staff, official that problem is currently assigned to (the sort of data you would get on a JIRA or Bugzilla Page)

3 - Search for Issues
Input: Search by date, location, status, category, etc
Output: List of found issues

4 - Live RSS Feed of issues as they are submitted

Joined the group today after seeing the shoutout on Fred Wilson's blog. Hoping to contribute any way I can!

Thanks,
Geddes Munson

Adding on to what geddes said, but starting a new comment thread:

Right - so to be clear, an Open 311, from the city's perspective, could be as simple as an open API for the existing 311 system.

The mapping, feedback systems, easy interaction with beneficial orgs, and so forth mentioned above could/would all be provided by third parties.

Still, a conversation that begins and ends with the words "open API" is a non-starter in the city government. You have to translate that into more tangible benefits to the city. That includes giving concrete examples of the possibilities, like those mentioned above, as well as talking about the more general benefits to the city that an open 311 would provide.

Off the top of my head some of these more general benefits of an Open 311 system include:

- Ease: it would be much cleaner and easier for the city to implement than Speaker Quinn's proposed 'hand held 311' currently being considered (see here http://diycity.org/diy-new-york-city/make-it-hand-held-311).

- Cost: it would be the most cost-effective way to realize additional utility to the existing 311 system, by off-loading the cost of developing new 311 services onto third party developers. In a time when the city's budget deficit runs into the billions, such a move is the most fiscally responsible one to make with 311.

- Expertise: an open 311 API would tap directly into the widest-possible pool (i.e. the public pool) of experts in the domains of data processing, mapping, gis, and social software, allowing them to collaborate and/or compete to build the best possible tools.

- Innovation: the city would see and benefit from innovative new uses of its data that it hadn't even considered.

Feel free to add any points I've missed here, or continue the discussion along any lines you like.

Good list and it sounds like it would improve NYC and existing 311 systems.

How would cities without 311 or any plan to do 311 take advantage? My city (Waterford Ireland) isn't going to even answer my call about this kind of system (they think e-government is DOC downloads on a website that you have to fax back.)

What would be great is this Open 311 system working with existing 311 systems but where none exist outsourcing the data to city inhabitants. Same standard interface, multi-access, trending etc. but a flexible data store that takes into account the cities existing or non-existant systems.

Great topic! In our letter I'd like to start by making sure that we appreciate the efforts of government staff whose 'open'-mindedness created the 311 system to begin with. Because of their vision, any further development along the lines of openness and transparency in gov't would be a continuation of their founding mission, not a course change. Additionally, other government agencies do have open intentions, as soon as they can figure out workflows . . . we might help here.

I'm in agreement with the general benefits listed above and second my friend and colleague marissagregory's urban design goals for the expanded site. In addition to the concrete benefits of these first steps towards an urban operating system, i'd add that one very abstract PR gain would be to raise NYC's global profile as an innovative megaregion.

Further thoughts which may slightly veer off thread -- 311 is now primarily a complaint & response or information request & response model, but obviously the government isn't the only agent acting in/on the urban fabric. Citizens act on the city's public resources as well, and i'd like to mention the case of NYC's ecosystem management since it's what i'm working on. Long surpassing what existing gov and non-gov agencies can maintain, ecosystem management is already a 'landscape' in which many individuals invisibly participate. Interface needed!

Hi,

I found DIYCity through Fred's post this morning, and I am really excited to join this discussion list and contribute in any way I can.

As far as New York City is concerned, I think the existing 311 system is pretty good on the back end (once I've submitted a problem, I've found them to be pretty responsive and it has always been taken care of within 48 hours).

Anthony's point about tagging issues is well taken, but at least as far as New York City is concerned, they have pretty good established categories for problems that get funneled to the right city department / person who can do something about it. It might make sense to turn the existing categories into tags though, so if a reporter is unsure what the proper category is, they could select multiple ones.

I'm pretty excited about the ideas Fred threw out in his post this morning. However I don't think though that the city needs to build all those features for them to become a reality. All they need to do is build an open API providing access the existing 311 back end. Once the API is built and maybe a simple reference implemenation is done by the city, any number of companies or individuals could build their own apps. This way the city wouldn't have to support multiple applications / platforms / versions but all the platforms out there could take advantage of open 311, and innovators out there could build the cool things we are talking about like tweeting problems using a certain syntax, building a dashboard with hot spots, etc.

An initial brainstorm of the functionality the the API should provide:
1 - Report a problem

Inputs: Lat/Long, Photo of Problem, Description of Problem, Severity of Problem, Problem Category, Confidentiality Flag

Return: Error with Error Message or Success with Issue Number

(Categories I am sure they already have defined in the 311 system, traffic problem, plumbing problem, mta problem, etc. A confidentiality flag might be important for potentially sensitive things like reporting that you're heat has been turned off. You may not want to see in a public database that you needed the city to turn on your heat cause you couldn't afford to pay your bill)

2 - Look up details of a specific issue

Input: Issue Number

Output: Comments by 311 staff, official that problem is currently assigned to

(I see this sort of like a JIRA or Bugzilla bug page)

3 - Search for Issues

Input: Search by date, location, status, category

Output: List of found issues

There is probably much more that could be done, but just having those three features: Report, Get Details, and Search available to any app developer would be a huge step.

if the city was nervous about potentially allowing companies to profit off this, they could spend some time on money and a couple well done implementations. Maybe a website and an iPhone app, and then provide access to the API to non-profit organizations or individuals who take a non-commercial pledge only.

Glad to be part of this list!

Thanks,

Geddes

Hi All,At last night's OpenGovNYC meetup, we formed a working group to focus on getting an Open 311 Data policy written and passed.  It was a good omen to see Fred's post and the DIYcity list pushing this same project today.

I have documented the meeting notes here:http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/index.php/Open_311_Data_PolicyI'd encourage everyone, especially DIYcity members already working on this, to add their contribuitions here, so that we can start to build a framework for this plan.  I chose the Sunlight Wiki because they have a lot of experience with policy, but perhaps a DIYcity wiki is the best place.

One clear task that I'd encourage individuals to take on is reaching out to advocacy groups to ask them specifically which data would be useful to them.  We have members who have already adopted housing advocacy groups in NYC, and safety advocacy groups in NYC.

We also discussed setting PdF (6/29-30) as an endpoint of sorts, so that we can test out the idea of a policy sprint.  We'd hope to have the meat of a policy proposal and a demo app that shows off the power of open data by then.

-Matt Cooperrider

Jumping into the conversation late, but I'm excited to see this getting traction.

The Open Planning Project has been interested in an Open311 of some sort for quite some time now (we purchased open311.org/com a few years ago while working on a similar project), and would definitely be interested in partnering on this on the tech side.

We have also been working very heavily on the Trac project, an open source ticket tracking system that would be a great basis for an extensible open 311 platform, especially for cities that don't have their own system yet. We're currently developing mobile and geospatial extensions for Trac that would suit this need perfectly.

I could see us putting together a reference implementation of the Open311 API using this setup and distributing it as open source.

What I see as open 311 API is just two basic things: Read/Write. But it should be supported by government.

1. You should have access to get information about any and all service requests.

2. You should be able to submit new service requests.

What you can build with this simple API independently from government is powerful:

* iPhone/mobile app to submit requests from the field
* community web portals/facebook apps where people can submit requests and share them with folks in their neighborhood (this will encourage people to submit more requests, and also will eliminate duplicate request in city's 311 system)
* other ways to crowdsource SR submissions - let say most people not inclined to spend much time reporting an issue, let them call in to a number and just record a voicemail with new request. After that mp3 will be posted on community website, and volunteers will parse/transcript request and resubmit it in actual 311 system.

--
Disclaimer:
I work for DC Government and we are running new Apps for Democracy contest http://appsfordemocracy.org as part of which we will implement open 311 API on government side and will allow developers to build apps on top of it.

See http://octolabs.pbworks.com/Open-311-API for API draft, follow us on twitter @octolabs for updates. Will keep you posted here and in Washington, DC group.

We are willing to make this API/effort transferrable and applicable to any city, once it is working for us. Code will be open-sourced, anyway.

We plan to have API formalized by end of May, and we will launch it for production use on July 1st (aligned with end of Apps for Democracy contest - winner will be first/major user of this API).

-Dmitry

Thanks, Ben. I wanted to mention that SeeClickFix has released a early draft of a open 311 API. Please read and provide feedback: http://seeclickfix.com/simple_pages/23

Here's the blog post we put up Friday on this:

Open 311 API – An Early Draft
Last week we blogged on the growing need for an open API for 311 and local issues/service requests. There has been a lot of attention paid to getting data OUT OF government. Gov 2.0 types have been all a-Twitter about Data.gov and the feeds being created at a rapid pace. That’s wonderful.

There also should be ways to send important and actionable data INTO governments and other civic organizations. It’s time for an open API for sending service requests or identifying issues that have a specific geographical component. For example, reporting a storm drain that is clogged or a streetlight that is out. Imagine if your smart-phone, your local blog, and websites like SeeClickFix could talk back and forth with local governments automatically.

We got a great response to the blog post (thanks!) and now it is time to move the conversation to the next level. And considering that there is a session at ChangeCamp Canada this weekend on discuss such a topic, Kam and I thought it best to publish an early draft.

As we mentioned in the last post, we want this to a community-supported standard. We’re not sure where it should live on the web (here or here?) or how it should be owned, licensed, etc. Should one vendor or local government drive the conversation or should an independent third-party carry the banner? Andrew Greenhill suggested perhaps the National League of Cities or the Conference of Mayors would be a US institutions interested in such an effort.

Regardless, we wanted to get our thoughts out there and get the party started.

Open311 API
Draft Specification
2009-06
v0.1

http://seeclickfix.com/simple_pages/23

Please read through it and let us know your thoughts. Look forward to hearing from you.

http://seeclickfix.blogspot.com/2009/06/last-week-we-blogged-on-growing-...

Thanks!