Can we “get an app for that” in New Orleans?
John Sutter, “Cities embrace mobile apps, ‘Gov 2.0′,” CNN.com:
Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist and a customer-service guru, was riding on a public train in San Francisco, California, recently when something common but annoying occurred: The railcar filled with people and became uncomfortably hot. …
Newmark pulled out his iPhone, snapped a photo of the train car and, using an app called “SeeClickFix,” zapped an on-the-go complaint, complete with GPS coordinates, straight to City Hall. …
Tech geeks [ahem, "developers," or "programmers," please] transform banal local government spreadsheets about train schedules, complaint systems, potholes, street lamp repairs and city garbage into useful applications for mobile phones and the Web. …
The idea is that tech communities are better able to make government data useful than the governments themselves, said Peter Corbett, CEO for iStrategyLabs and organizer of a contest called “Apps for Democracy” in Washington.
But can government institutions handle requests for services from a more-engaged citizenry? It doesn’t necessarily follow that more technology changes the efficiency and responsiveness of government:
The complaints don’t always results in fixes, of course, because cities have limited resources. But Purchia said some problems that the city wouldn’t otherwise know about are being addressed because of mobile applications and its Twitter program
We already know, here in New Orleans, that the sum is greater than the parts when government acts as a partner in neighborhood desires to improve their quality of life. We’ve also, unfortunately, seen how much government can be a brake, instead, exerting a negative influence on neighborhood desires.
Another concern not addressed in the article is how service requests received from third-party apps might distort the delivery of services toward more affluent neighborhoods.
The answer to these concerns is not to hide from technology, but to allow technology to govern change, and to address the business process and equity problems in a transparent and accountable manner. A more forward-looking approach would also identify opportunities to bridge the digital divide by, for example, encouraging tech-savvy youth to participate in the well-being of their neighborhoods by engaging with and helping their less-savvy neighbors.
That’s the purpose of the inter-related, exhaustively-researched policy recommendations in NolaStat. It’s about opening up the records of City Hall to repurpose them — an open data policy. But it’s also about performance management and citizen engagement, so that community priorities are heard from diverse neighborhoods, so that equity and fairness in the delivery of services can be demonstrated, and so that city services improve with measurable outcomes.
Read more about how NolaStat is a model for managing reform of City Hall in the post, “An engine for increasing the velocity of democracy.”
Brian, we at CitySourced are doing our best to conquer the digital divide in this exact same space. Our goal is to bring citizen empowerment to everyone, regardless of their economic stature. That being said, we’re making some key innovations over SeeClickFix that you’ll see in the very near future. Thanks for bringing up an important issue. Rest assured we at CitySourced are addressing it! Download our application - it’s free and easier to use - http://itunes.apple.com/app/citysourced/id336854714 - We’d love to hear your feedback on it.