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DIYcity Challenge #6: *Special Challenge*

Submitted by John Geraci on 16 March 2009 - 6:49pm to Discussions.

The DIYcity Challenge for this week is this: come up with a DIYcity Challenge.

What is something in your city that is ripe for improvement? What service could be done better (or cheaper) using open, participatory web technologies? What is an instance where your city government is approaching the solution to some problem all wrong?

In other words: what are the real problems that need solving, exactly? And which of these problems is the low hanging fruit?

There are lots of policy people, planners and people with ideas about their city on this list - this is your chance to speak up and help inform the building that goes on via the Challenges here on DIYcity.

All answers must be in the form of a Challenge. All answers will be reposted as DIYcity Challenges.

Post your response/challenge below.

16 Mar19:49

Opening up existing data systems

By dpk

The City of Milwaukee has extensive data that cannot be directly accessed by public users, except in the form of unstructured text sent by email: http://www.city.milwaukee.gov/DISPLAY/ROUTER.ASP?DOCID=745
or PDFS generated from queries:
http://www.milwaukee.gov/PublicApplications13176.htm

Some selected data sets can be mapped by public users through a proprietary web interface. Other data sets, despite being public record, are restricted by login screens requiring a password:
http://www.city.milwaukee.gov/itmd
http://www.city.milwaukee.gov/PublicApplications13176.htm
http://www.city.milwaukee.gov/CustomApplications13177.htm

Users with ESRI's proprietary ArcGIS software and privilieged access can tap this data from remote clients.
http://compass.milwaukee.gov/

But of course none of the data or maps can be shared unless you resort to screenshots and cut & paste, unless I am missing something. Am I? Are there ways to disseminate and map this data on the web as it becomes available? What are example of other cities that have a more open interface? What are the best ways to get things moving in that direction?

16 Mar20:04

re: opening up existing systems

By John Geraci

My god that's a truly awesome idea. Thanks for sharing.

Who else has one?

(If submitting a response by email, reply to the original announcement of the Challenge, sent by me, not to this email.)

(If submitting a response on the site, remember to only submit your post once - it will work, we promise. this problem *may* be fixed as early as tomorrow. fingers crossed.)

17 Mar18:43

New York City 311 Mobile App

By lovebuck

News recently about our Council Speaker Quinn and Councilperson Brewer's idea for a mobile app that would access the city's popular 311 system. For those far away, 311 is a phone number to call in NYC when you want virtually any info about the city--usually through a redirect to certain agency numbers, or direct info on the spot from operators. It has been a huge success.

How about an app that allows access to the same database that the City 311 operators use? Yes, would require data coordination from the City, but they have been reported to be open to this idea in general.

The same way Google 411 lets you bypass the operator and get richer web-based 'info', a 311 app could allow you--within certain limits--obtain all the info already at hand in the call centers. Most of what the operators tell you is on a screen into which they've typed you query...

Maybe this is a larger project than DIY Challenge intends--but worth a look?

17 Mar19:16

re: 311 challenge

By John Geraci

That's great. We're submitting an open letter to the city of New York about this, so we should make it a challenge, too.

Anyone else? Who else has a challenge? Doesn't have to be NYC-centric, can be for any city, anywhere.

17 Mar20:00

Re: re: 311 challenge

By Jordan

By the way, a great model for city-provided data on the web is
Washington DC: http://data.octo.dc.gov/

Sickcity.org (which is an amazing accomplishment for a week's work,
btw) could be a good model for a more general twitter-based 311
complaint/issue monitoring service for cities. Imagine something like
a New York City dashboard of twitter related posts about:
#rats
#potholes
#bedbugs
#noise
#trashpickup
etc.

Maybe some of these kinds of issues are too address-specific to be
useful, though. (You might not want to share your rat or
bedbug-infested address on twitter, for example.)

Jordan

23 Mar16:01

Court information

By eclisham

Well, since someone mentioned Washington, DC, I'll chime in.

I've been attending community meetings lately focused on crime in my Washington, DC, neighborhood -- everything from drug dealing in nuisance properties to gang intimidation to shootings and stabbings and convicted felons being let back out into the community without sufficient supervision. Two things have become clear:

  1. More agencies touch a criminal case in this city than anywhere else on the planet, I think. There's so much back and forth between federal and city jurisdictions that even the lawyers are confused, so imagine how ordinary citizens feel! The potential for things to fall between the floorboards is enormous. In addition, any public information about a criminal case is made available in individual Word-type documents, not in a searchable database, which leads me to ...
  2. ... There's no organized way for a concerned citizen to track a particular criminal case through the system, to see where it is: arrest, bail, court date, trial, conviction, sentencing, parole/supervised release. Police and prosecutors complain that they can't get witnesses for trials or community impact statements for parole/probation hearings, but it's very clear that most citizens have no idea when these are taking place. The onus is often on the community member to seek out the information, rather than having the information pushed to him or her. No wonder citizen participation is minimal.

How hard would it be to establish a tracking system, respecting necessary privacy (many of these cases, sadly, involve juvenile offenders), searchable via Web browser OR MOBILE WEB, since many people in my neighborhood have cell phones but do not have broadband Internet access, with RSS or SMS updates, for criminal cases? Has this been done anywhere?

05 May16:00

Crowd-sourced 311 for every city

By paulmwatson

Been thinking about this for awhile now and am glad to see it is already being done.

(Note; I've never used 311 as I don't live in NYC.)

A crowd-sourced 311 for every city would be interesting. Voice, SMS/text, web, mobile, Twitter-bot and IM access. Not ever city has a 311 service so the data needs to come from city inhabitants. But what I would avoid is having different paths to similar data in every city i.e. "list of hospitals in [City name]" should work the same way in NYC and in Delhi and in Cape Town. I want to be able to get off a plane in a new city and using a standard query get the list of taxi services. The only thing that changes is my location/the city name. And the results need to work on a big 17" screen with broadband or on a three line basic mobile handset over SMS.

01 Jul17:10

Easy to copy Formats

By apoikola

When reading the challenges and suggestion it seems that many things have been all ready developed in some city.

The challenge is: How could we create formats of good services that are easy to copy from one city to another?

The idea of easy-to-copy formats is familiar from franchising business (for example Mc Donald's), from TV shows (Idols) and from licensing concepts like BODYPUMP.

Normally the format is something more complicated than just a product that could be mass produced and sold all over the world. Format is a way to create the same kind of service in different environment with less risk. Also the well known brand is valuable for formats.

For example it is really easy to set up a local DIY city group and there is a short format how the get the local group going: http://diycity.org/wiki/index.php?title=Getting_Your_DIYcity_Local_Group...

There is also same kind of thinking in the DIYTraffic: http://diycity.org/wiki/index.php?title=DIYtraffic_-_Instructions_for_In...

However I believe that the process of making something succesfull, the selling arguments, visual branding material, translations in several languages etc. are atleast as valuable as the open source code.