New Orleans open government in just one day?
You could be sending 311 complaints to city officials, and receiving 311 updates, using Facebook and Twitter, in just about a day.
All that’s lacking is a mayor willing to make the commitment to this kind of open government. Well, that, and … um … turning the 311 system on again. Actually, there’s more to it than one day. Read on.
The 311 API (application programming interface) and programming code are now publicly available, thanks to an open source collaboration between The Open Planning Project, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, and other cities.
Underscoring how revolutionary this development was, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was joined by Vivek Kundra, President Obama’s Chief Information Officer, to announce the release of the Open311 standard.
Kundra flew to San Francisco for the launch, but also spent time in the area collecting ideas from the private sector on ways government agencies could operate more efficiently.
“For far too long, the federal government has relied on the same old ideas and the same small group of people to deploy billions of dollars in information technology projects that for too long have not yielded the dividends they promised up front,” Kundra said.
“The president has been clear that the federal government does not have a monopoly on the best ideas, and the best thinking is not necessarily within the four walls of Washington,” Kundra added.
IT workers might normally spend months making 311 services work through social networking sites like Twitter or Facebook, said Chris Vein, the CIO of San Francisco.
“We’ve done all of that work. We’ve come up with all of those rules and standards and we’re giving it away for free,” said Vein. “If somebody in another city wants to use this, they can take it and their programmers don’t have to spend months going through the protocols and figuring out how to make it interoperable.”
Here are a few gotchas for New Orleans:
1) First of all, yes, the 311 system would have to be turned on. That’s sure to happen in time.
2) Mayor-elect Mitch Landrieu would have to commit to opening up a 311 API for citizen programmers to work with. There’s no reason to believe that he wouldn’t, but thus far he hasn’t been briefed on the benefits of NolaStat, nor has he made any specific pledges to an open data policy. But this is an easy political win for Mitch. He should do it — and do it immediately, at the start of his administration.
3) There’s no guarantee that improving the public’s ability to make 311 complaints about potholes, blighted property, or burned out street lights will actually get those problems fixed in a timely manner. The way things are set up now, the city might as well tell people to throw their complaints into a giant hole and say a prayer. Mitch Landrieu is going to have to focus on the hard work of getting the city’s departments on track to achieve a set of high priority objectives that tie into benchmarked performance criteria, and that match budget line items. He’ll also have to evaluate the merit of a highly outsourced City Hall, and make efforts to build up the professional capacity of city workers. Fortunately, Mitch has given every indication that he understands these challenges.
4) Finally, San Francisco’s 311 services were built on top of a Lagan 311 system. That may not be readily compatible with New Orleans’ 311 system, but the fact that open 311 standards were developed, and that San Francisco received help from a non-profit dedicated to open government, means that city open government systems are only a question of time.
To conclude, it might take a little longer than a day to build open government in New Orleans, but the signposts point to a positive direction.
Open311 seems pretty exciting.
You say Landrieu hasn’t been briefed on NolaStat… Are you talking to anyone on the transition team? Is this on his radar? It certainly should be!
A policy advisor was briefed, and his response was that NolaStat goals were consistent with Mitch’s goals. I have been working on the periphery through contacts in the transition team to convey the message, but I’m not satisfied that Mitch has had the opportunity to evaluate for himself how incredibly beneficial this would be to the city, and to him politically.