Brainstorm / Visualization / Analysis / Data Usage Breakout Session

Future-looking discussion of advanced applications for 311 services. The assumption is that the data (including near-realtime data) is available from the 311 system.

Summary:

1. Digg style prioritization service, reputation layer optional
2. blame.us - who’s responsible, accountable - chain of blame for problems - and who can fix this?
3. Public SR history - surfacing history of SR (and the related entities)
4. Noisescore - realtime reporting of decibel levels
5. Open Geo Stack - for the city (SaaS)
6. Activity Streams - social and firehose
7. Public Sidebar/ShiftSpace/OpenLayers - map layer
8. Heart.us - neighborhoods competing to care the most about the neighborhoods
9. .org+.gov matching system
10. Hyperlocal dashboard - visualization of everything going on in a several block area
11. 311 for engagement - opt-in for hearing about city announcements etc when you contact
12. Elected officials visualization

More Notes: Assume: bidirectional comm/lifecycle tracking for SRs

Weighting/reputation for prioritization of requests

• intelligent triaging of dupes; additional permissions based on karma/sincerity
• full history tracking

lobb.ly, blame.us

• reports - information of agency in charge, elected representatives, etc. etc.
• where to cast blame? who is responsible? more importantly, who can *fix* this

Also, public history? ex.: perpetual pothole on the street getting local community to petition service request vs capital project - can 311 help w/ strategic/political decision making (bigger picture)? by making it available to the public open up requests, a more informed public bicycle crash report - case history?

using 311 reports to publicize - state issues

• building political will across jurisdictional boundaries
• sunlighting - seeclickfix examples: CT traintracks

NYC 311 - Analytics

• internal BI system - access to anyone in govt who asks
• star schema - 311 middle - points - building inspection, sewage maintenance
• sensitive data - usually not?
• some of the most useful data for public is the least sensitive
• inspector reporting conditions on the street (telnav input)
• on nyc.gov, but data feeds not available

analytics/visualization if you have the data, being able to slice/query/visualize:

• types of reports, reporters, open requests
• time to resolution, accounting by reporting channel, geography, socio-economic lines etc
• overlaying requests to funding
• view trends over time

City run, publicly available opengeo platform

• annotations, histories ACLs (anecdote)
• privately developed by nyu/columbia urban studies
• deemed classified information post 9/11 (heights etc compiled from public data)
• citymap - security, privacy levels

challenges:

• not enough resources at the state level to create a unified standard
• counties doing their own stuff based on their own expertise (HAVA compliance)

Timeliness is an issue - is the data propagating? is the entry better (the iPhone app being slowere than the old text only version)

surfacing public activity streams

• PuSH - firehose - stream not dumps
• social - social activity stream (opting in)
• logging in link FB? is that identity - per item basis
• PuSH + Salmon - private conversations back up
• achievements, announcements: pothole fixed thanks to @a @b @c!

heart.us

• 311 as proxy for how much people care about a neighborhood
• scoring/game dynamics
• prompts behavior (simple numbers, see if it helps or make things worse – unfortunately long term effects)
• aligning social incentives, stats, engagement
• 311 as strategy game, online game
• make it fun?

Civic Sidebar Wikipedia

• Google Sidebar - won’t or can’t respond to.
• Map Layers - shiftspace

passive sensing

• dash style - can there be problems reported passively using mobile sensors