Category Archives: application

San Francisco integrates city services, 311 and Facebook

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The city of San Francisco now has a Facebook application that integrates with SF 311 service requests. The Facebook application appears to work in a similar fashion as the “Tweet my 311” service that integrates 311 with Twitter, albeit with additional privacy concerns because of the data that Facebook profiles contain.

The page links to help page on Facebook and SF311 that provides more details about San Francisco’s policies. The city appears to have though through some of the privacy issues that the integration with Facebook could create.

Specifically, a citizen does not have to share her information with the city to submit a 311 request. A citizen may remain anonymous while using the application and still submit a service request to SF311.

Here’s the rundown:

  • You can disable sharing in your profile’s privacy settings.
  • You can be anonymous by logging out of your Facebook account (or not logging in).
  • On the Facebook Login page click the “Cancel” button to go directly to the application (app). You will then have the option of manually adding your contact information to the Eform prior to submitting it, if desired.
  • You can be anonymous by allowing access, then removing your contact information populated by the application.
    If you don’t have a Facebook account.

    • That said, the city also states that “in some cases, contact information is mandatory based on the nature of the request or report,” so anonymity isn’t going to be possible in all situations. Additionally, “in other cases, it is essential to assist agencies in obtaining any follow up information required in order to service or address the problem.”

    Depending upon how implementation and adoption moves forward, this integration of Facebook and San Francisco’s 311 system may provide a template for other cities to follow.

    More on the story at SFGate.com: Facebook app speeds access to city services.

    New recommendations for improving local open government and creating online hubs

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    Today, the Aspen Institute hosted a roundtable on government transparency and online hubs in Washington, DC. You can watch the archived webcast below.

    http://www.newmediamanager2.net/sites/all/modules/newmediamill/flashclip/player.swf

    The roundtable focused on the release of two new white papers. The first, “Creating Local Online Hubs: Three Models for Action,” by Adam Thierer, discusses scenarios where community leaders, citizens, media, technologists and — critically, local government — can work together” to create local online hubs where citizens can access information about their governments and local communities.” Creating such high-quality online information hubs was one of the 15 key recommendations of Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. “Just as communities depend on maps of physical space, they should create maps of information flow that enable members of the public to connect to the data and information they want,” said the Knight Commission. (Download PDF or Read Online)

    “Governments need to get more information out and make it more accessible, said Thierer today. “This shouldn’t be controversial.” Thierer said that government can do well to catalyze and support this development simply by doing a better job of making such information easily available in easy to use formats. While open government data stores have grown, Thierer noted that this has not trickled down. He cited the example of Manor, Texas as one example of where one local champion (former CIO Dustin Haisler) got help from Stanford and other external resources to get the local open data repository online.

    Broadly, Thierer described three models for online hubs:

    • Hubs focused on community government information. Example: Texas Tribune
    • Community connections: local forums and community email listservs. Example: e-democracy.org
    • Community news and commentary. Example: Universal Hub

    Thierer focused on the important role that libraries and local or state universities can play in this new ecosystem, by connected offline and online worlds. These universities could create “code toolboxes” that local communities can use, as Stanford did for Manor. He hoped that that model could be replicated nationally.

    Government transparency

    Government Transparency: Six Strategies for More Open and Participatory Government, by Jon Gant and Nicol Turner-Lee, is call to action for state and local governments to adopt open government. The six sensible strategies “focus on enhancing government expertise and transparency, educating citizens regarding the availability and utility of government information and e-government tools, expanding efforts to support greater adoption of broadband Internet access services and devices, and forging public-private-citizen partnerships in order to enhance open government solutions.” (Download PDF or Read Online)

    There are three basic issues here, according to Turner-Lee:

    • Do people get it?
    • Do they have the resources they need?
    • Can they do transparency with those resources?

    “All of us who have been in this debate have seen a conflict between these three factors, said Turner-Lee. The question, she said Turner-Lee, is how we empower state and local government. The challenge is that in most open data effort, “We are still in a one-way world, where data is pushed down to the public, not in a reciprocal ecosystem.”

    It’s one thing to say citizens who should be involved, said Turner-Lee, but more needs to be done. “As an organizer, I can speak to that. It’s hard to get people to a block meeting,” much less meeting online, she said. There’s also a persistent issue of the digital divide that has to be addressed in this context. “We cannot proclaim government transparency” where millions of people don’t have online access, said Turner-Lee.

    There are many examples of where open data is being put to use on the behalf of citizens now. Turner cited apps driven by transit data in Chicago, heritage trees in Portland or the use of 311 by SeeClickFix in the District of Columbia.

    Jon Grant focused on a major pain point for government at all levels for tapping into the innovation economy: procurement issues, which civic entrepreneurs run into in cities, statehouses and Washington. “It is time to look at these procurement rules more closely,” he said, and promote higher levels of innovation. “There are a lot of ideas are happening but a lot of rules restrict vendors from interacting in government,” said Grant. Turner-Lee observed that traditional procurement laws may also not be flexible enough to bring more mobile apps into government.

    Fundamentally, empowering more government transparency through the Internet will require both creating a climate for the actions, said Turner-Lee, but also through structural changes, specifically, through the release of spectrum and Universal Service Fund (USF) reform.

    It will also require that state and local government officials are part of the conversation, “It they aren’t at the table, we’re going to be pretty much talking to ourselves,” said Turner-Lee.

    Former San Francisco CIO Chris Vein, now the new White House deputy CTO for government innovation, agreed. biggest challenge of all is that we like to think there are templates. to a certain extent, they can be. fundamentally, all politics is local. To make this work in government, a community “needs someone who takes risks, who goes out there and makes it happen regardlesss of the cost.”

    All stakeholder at the panel acknowledged the crucial importance of community institutions, nonprofits and libraries in addressing issues of the digital divide and creating a bridge between online hubs and local citizens. Turner Lee noted that billions of people over the course of years have come into libraries for assistance, particularly the homeless and low-income citizens. “What better way to get people into the system by enabling libraries to be a conduit of information?” she asked.

    “Public information belongs to the public, and the public’s business should be done in public,” said Turner. That said, local citizens also don’t want data for the sake of data. “Consumption of this data would be inconsistent if the data doesn’t provide quality of life,” she said.

    Platforms for citizensourcing emerge in Egypt

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    As people watching the impact of social media in the events in Egypt know, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube played a role. Today, Microsoft’s director of public sector engagement, Mark Drapeau, sent word that the Redmond-based software company’s open source ideation platform, Town Hall, has been deployed at nebnymasr.org to collect ideas.

    The highest profile implementation of Town Hall to date was for crowdsourcing ideas in Congress for the incoming Republican majority in Congress at “America Speaking Out.”

    This Town Hall instance and others show how citizensourcing platforms can be tailored to channel feedback around specific topics, as opposed to less structured platforms. As governments and citizens try to catalyze civic engagement using the Internet, creating better architectures for citizen participation will be critical. Clay Shirky’s talk about the Internet, citizenship and lessons for government agencies at the Personal Democracy Forum offered some insight on that count. Using taxonomies to aggregate ideas instead of a single list was a key takeaway.

    To date, the Egyptian citizensourcing site has logged a few dozen questions and votes. Whether usage of the site will grow more or not is up for debate. The network effect may working against it. As ReadWriteWeb reported last week, Egyptians are using Google Moderator to brainstorm Egypt’s future. Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who played a role in Egypt’s recent revolution, started a Google Moderator page for Egypt entitled, “Egypt 2.0, what does we need? What are our dreams?!.” To date, the Moderator instance has logged 1,361,694 votes for more than 50,000 of the ideas submitted by nearly 40,000 users.

    Building open source platforms for open government

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    Agency.com/open

    Open Public template

    As reported in Radar yesterday, Phase2 Consulting acquired two more Drupal distributions.

    With the acquisition of Open Atrium and Managing News, Phase2 now has the top four Drupal distributions in use in government and the media. It already hosted the OpenPublic and OpenPublish distributions, both of which are used by government and publishing clients. AfghanistanElectionData.org was using Managing News. So was HaitiAidMap.org.

    The move could pave the way for increased interoperability between federal, state and local .gov websites that use Open Atrium and Open Public. Given the economic realities that face the media industry, improvements to collaboration and functionality on the Managing News and Open Publish distributions are also likely to be of interest to online publishers.

    Given the budget pressures that face all levels of government in 2011, the ability to share code between government should not be underestimated as a cost saver. Increased interoperability was one driver behind the the websites for dozens of freshman Representatives on House.gov moved to Drupal. (It’s not clear yet how developments costs were affected in the House.)

    That move followed the transition of the most high profile government websites in the world to Drupal: WhiteHouse.gov. The blog post on open source at WhiteHouse.gov supported the development of projects within the Open Atrium collaboration suite.

    When open source and open government took the stage at the State Department earlier this month, the White House released more open source code back into the Drupal community.

    If .gov is the new .com, Drupal is now positioned to play an even bigger role in providing the infrastructure for those data driven websites.

    Civic coders for America gather in DC for a Presidents’ Day datacamp

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    This past weekend, civic developers gathered at a Seattle data camp to code for America. This Presidents’ Day, the day before George Washington’s Birthday, dozens of government technologists, data nerds, civic hackers and citizens from around the District of Columbia, Virginia and Maryland will join Code for America fellows for a datacamp at Big Window Labs.

    The attendees of the Washington datacamp can look to the Seattle Data Camp for inspiration. The civic hacktivism on display there led to engaged discussions about Seattle’s South Park neighborhood, mobile damage assessment apps, transit apps, mobile / geolocation apps, data mining, information visualization.

    Perhaps even more impressive, one of those discussions lead to the creation of a new smartphone application. Hear Near pushes alerts about Seattle events nearby to iPhone or Android device users using text messages. Hear Near is now available from iTunes and Android.

    Joe McCarthy published a terrific post about Data Camp Seattle that offers a great deal of insight into why the event worked well. McCarthy helped the HearNear team by identifying and defining mappings between the GeoLoqi API and the iCal feed.

    McCarthy describes how a creative discussion amongst talented, civic-minded people enabled them to donate their skills to putting the open data from Seattle’s data repository to work for its citizens. He also explored what inspires him about Code for America:

    I wasn’t sure what to expect going into the event, but was greatly impressed with the interactions, overall experience and outcomes at Data Camp Seattle. I’ve admired the Code for America project since first learning about it, and have been a proponent of open data and platform thinking (and doing) on my blog. It was inspiring and empowering to have an opportunity to do more than simply blog about these topics … though I recognize the potential irony of writing that statement in a new blog post about these topics.

    I suspect that one of the most durable outcomes of the Code for America project will be this kind of projection or radiation of civic empowerment through – and beyond – the efforts of the CfA fellows and their collaboration partners. In The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler writes about how “[t]he practice of producing culture makes us all more sophisticated readers, viewers, and listeners, as well as more engaged makers”. In Program or Be Programmed, Doug Rushkoff warns against “relinquishing our nascent collective agency” to computers and the people who program them by engaging in “a renaissance of human capacity” by becoming programmers ourselves.

    While many – or even most – of the specific applications we designed and developed during the Data Camp Seattle civic hackathon may not gain widespread traction and use, if the experience helps more of us shift our thinking – and doing – toward becoming co-creators of civic applications – and civic engagement – then the Code for America project will have succeeded in achieving some grand goals indeed.

    This example of directed action at an unconference has fast become the next step in the evolution of camps, where a diverse set of volunteers come together to donate more than money or blood: they exchange information and then apply their skills to creating solutions to the needs defined by a given set of societal challenges.

    This model of directed civic involvement has became a global phenomenon in wake of the crisiscamps that sprung up after the earthquake in Haiti last year. The cultural DNA of these camps has evolved into CrisisCommons, which has acted as platform for volunteers to donate their skills to help in natural disasters and other crises.

    As the role of the Internet as a platform for collective action grows, those volunteers are gaining more ability to make a difference using powerful lightweight collaboration tecnology and open source data tools.

    From the towns of the United States to cities in Denmark, Brazil, Kenya, Illinois and India, people interested in local Gov 2.0 have been gathering to to create applications that use open public data. In December, Around the world, the International Open Data Hackathon convened participants in over 56 cities in 26 countries on 5 continents.

    As Seattle CIO Bill Schrier put it this past weekend, they’re turning data into information. Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra has praised these kinds of efforts “hacking for humanity.” An event like Random Hacks of Kindness “brings together the sustainable development, disaster risk management, and software developer communities to solve real-world problems with technology.”

    On President’s Day, another datacamp will try to put that vision into action.

    http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js //

    Civic developers gather to code for America at data camps

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    Today in Seattle, over 50 civic developers have gathered at Socrata to work on coding applications from the city’s open data repository at data.seattle.gov. Today’s Seattle datacamp, organized by Code for America, is just one of several data camps that the new civic service is convening in host cities around the United States. Chacha Sikes, a 2011 Code for America fellow, explains what’s behind these data camps:

    City governments have a lot of information which is useful to all of us. This ranges from maps of local parks to building footprints to real-time 911 calls. We all have an interest in our budget information, legislative documents and other resources that we use in collective decision-making and deliberation. Not all of this information is currently available for all cities, even though much of it is public record. The “Open Data” movement is a way to work on getting information into machine-readable formats, allowing for easy publishing, sharing, and reuse.

    We’re hosting DataCamps in CfA’s cities this year to build communities around making city data more open and accessible to allow citizens to help cities work better.

    DataCamp is a event focusing on skill-building and collaborative work on city data. It is an opportunity for interested parties in a city to work together, and build a network of people with shared interested in improving civic communications and information management.

    Sanjay B. Hyatt, a writer at the Seattle Times, is at the data camp in the Pacific Northeast. He reported back that CTO Bill Schrier said that Seattle has 100 data sets. “Turn that data into information.”

    DataCamp Seattle is using a Drupal site and a DataCamp Seattle Google group to coordinate and share notes. In the tradition of unconferences and barcamps, they’re also using a more analog method to sort out ideas and projects: sticky notes. Virtual observers can see the various projects going up, including calendars, an impact survey, an apps workshop and a “pimp my blog” to help stimulate the creation of hyperlocal blogs.

    More data camps are coming soon to Seattle and Washington, D.C.

    UPDATE: A day after the datacamp, a new app is available to Seattle residents. Hear Near pushes alerts about Seattle events nearby to mobile phone users using text messages.

    Hear Near is available from iTunes and Android.

    Hear Near was created by a team that included Amber Case (whose geolocation startup, Geoloqi, powers it), Aaron Parecki, Joe McCarthy, Jesse Kocher, Gene Homicki, Naoya Makino, Steve Ripley, Rebecca Gutterman and Jenny Frank.

    Frank, a self-identified “non-techie” who attended the camp, came away with the feeling that “nothing is impossible.”

    Panoramic image credits to Chris Metcalf.

    New York City launches 311 online service request map

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    If you read Steven B. Johnson, you know that 100 million 311 calls reveal a lot about New York. Now citizens can surf over to look at those 311 requests every day. Today, New York City launched a 311 online service request map.

    “The launch of the 311 Service Request Map is another milestone in the City’s efforts to improve the way we report 311 data to the public,” said Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith in a prepared statement. “The release of this information will better enable the public and elected officials to hold the City accountable for the services we provide. Putting better information into the hands of community leaders across the five boroughs increases transparency and allows us to collaboratively address the problems that neighborhoods face.”

    It appears that Inwood and Washington Heights are making the most 311 service requests, according to the latest version of the map.

    This 311 online service request map is a good start, with layers, custom searches and a clean design. Querying for those layers is a bit slow but returns relevant results for bike parking or continuing education, although many of the other layers appear to be grayed out and “coming soon.” Querying for specific request types was even slower, so for the moment I can’t find out where complaints about poison ivy, illegal animals or noisy church services are concentrated.

    Early reviews have generally been positive but guarded, with room to grow. It’s a “huge step forward, long way to go,” tweeted Philip Ashlock. They “could get something better for free (eg mobile) by doing #Open311 API instead,” referring to the idea of government as a platform.

    I “would much rather have the data raw via an API in an open [format] than the map UI (which isn’t all bad) in the way,” tweeted Mark Headd.

    The “NYC 311 map is impressive technically, but lacks context (time period?), a legend (Maps 101), & metadata. I wonder if they talked to users before implementing it,” tweeted Steven Romalewski. “Also, the city obviously has the address-level 311 data. It’d be nice if they published the raw data so others could analyze it (residents & NYC Council reps have been asking for this for years). That would indicate a real commitment to transparency.”

    UPDATE: Nick Judd published an excellent post on the New York City 311 map at techPresident, where he reports that “raw complaint data from 311 on the city’s data repository, the NYC DataMine, later this year, according to a city spokesman.” Judd also fills in a couple of key details, like:

    • The application was built using the city’s public city-wide geospatial information system, CityMap
    • Requests for literature are not included in the NYC 311 map
    • Deputy Mayor Stephen P. Goldsmith acknowledged in a press conference today, reported on by the New York Times, “this addition to the city’s open data efforts was a nod to transparency advocates.”

    “Some of this will not be entirely exciting for those of us whose job it is to make sure that the holes in the street are filled and the trash is picked up because it’ll provide visibility to what we are or not doing,” Mr. Goldsmith said. “And some of you will enjoy that visibility.”

    As Judd links out, in the New York Times Cityroom blog has good coverage of the step towards getting a visual on New Yorkers’ 311 calls.

    Solving your neighbor’s possum problem in the dark? There’s an app for that.

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    One of the most common aphorisms heard around the Gov 2.0 world is that “potholes are the gateway drugs to civic engagement.”

    After a recent report in Boston, maybe Hub pundits can add a new phrase to the lexicon: “possums are the gateway animal to citizens connecting.”

    As the indefatigable Adam Gaffin reported at Universal Hub, the wonderful hyperlocal blog in Beantown, the Citizens Connect app has now been deployed as Boston’s high tech possum saver.

    According to Gaffin’s post, Susan Landibar of South Boston saw a possum report:

    “Possum in my trash can. Can’t tell if it’s dead. Barrel in back of 168 west 9th. How do I get this removed?”

    And acted upon it:

    Labandibar reports:
    11:15PM Walked over to West Ninth Street. It’s about three blocks from my house. Locate trash can behind house. Possum? Check. Living? Yep.

    Turned the trash can on its side. Walked home. Good night, sweet possum.

    When the city of Boston released the Citizens Connect application, which works on Android phones and iPhones, officials no doubt expected it to help constituents report potholes, graffiti, unplowed snow and trash removal.

    And indeed, if you look through the list of reported issues, that’s the bulk of it.

    After today, however, the city can add “possum problems” to the list of resolved issues. Crucially, however, it wasn’t the city that fixed it: it was a fellow citizen who saw an issue using the app and then went and took care of it herself.

    For good or ill, this example of “do it ourselves” government is a data point that may be increasingly relevant. Plummeting city budgets mean smarter cities will need citizen sensors to detect issues and take civic pride into their own hands. As Gov 2.0 goes local, applications that connect citizens to one another in crises may become as important as technologies that connect citizens to government, like Citizens Connect.

    As the role of the Internet as a platform for collective action grows, Clay Shirky may be proven prescient: “We have historically overestimated the value of access to information and underestimated the value of access to one another.”

    HHS launches Health.Data.gov

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    Last October, Todd Park, the chief technology officer at the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) announced HealthData.gov at the HealthCamp in San Francisco. Today, Health.Data.gov went live. When the domain name propagates properly through the Internet, HealthData.gov will send online users directly to the new community at Data.gov.

    Park blogged about HealthData.gov and the open health data initiative on Data.gov this morning.

    “HealthData.gov is a one-stop resource for the growing ecosystem of innovators who are turning data into new applications, services, and insights that can help improve health,” he wrote.

    The new open health data site includes community features and links to more than a thousand indicators at HealthIndicators.gov and a health apps showcase.

    New apps like iTriage have the potential to turn open health data to better decisions and build new businesses. Speaking at the State Department’s open source conference last week, Park said that tens of thousands of citizens have now used the health data in iTriage to find community health centers.

    Park has been working to make community health information as useful as weather data through the release of open health data from HSS. Today, the nation now can see more about what the tech community has come up since this spring, when the question of whether “there’s a healthcare app for that” was answered the first time. “Social value and economic value can go hand in hand,” he told a health IT summit in San Francisco.

    Below, Park speaks more about what open health data could mean at last weekend’s health 2.0 code-a-thon in Washington, DC.

    http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1&isUI=1

    Here come the healthcare apps.

    Nicholas Gruen on Gov 2.0 in Australia and cultural change

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    “I began the Gov 2.0 taskforce thinking that open government was a kind of civil rights agenda, even if it has economic costs,” said Nicholas Gruen last week in Santa Clara at the Strata Conference. Gruen headed Australia’s Gov 2.0 taskforce. “At the end of it, I realized that open government was actually a really powerful economic driver.”

    Why? Gruen pointed to the efficiencies presented inside of government by improved communication and the opportunities to ask citizens for ideas and solutions to problems. “Even if our team said we couldn’t do it technically, I just said we’ll tell everyone that we need help and approach it that way.” Asking questions was, he said, an effective means of accomplishing many tasks much faster than they would have been otherwise.

    In a video interview, embedded below, Gruen talked more about the state of Gov 2.0 in Australia and some of his thoughts of the economics involved His comments on cultural change will be of particular interest those focused on technology as a panacea to inefficiency or engagement.

    The recent historic flooding in Australia created an urgent use case for improved communications between the public and government. “When you look at the Queensland floods, the Facebook of the police department use blew people away,” said Gruen. “Their links got many comments and compliments.”

    For more about how social media combine with geospatial mapping in crisis response, read about a new online application from geospatial mapping giant ESRI that applies trend analysis to help responders to Australia’s recent floods create relevance and context from citizen-generated reports.

    Achieving better outcomes through technology isn’t just about setting up a Facebook page or Twitter account, emphasized Gruen. Public servants have to be willing to share information that matters to citizens and in turn listen to feedback from the public to create better feedback loops.

    “This is a cultural transformation,” said Gruen. “You can’t impose that. You can’t dictate it.”

    Further reading: “Gov 2.0 Down Under: Australia and Open Government“