Justin Auciello: The New Wave Planner

Once again, San Francisco’s city government is conducting the innovation train

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom formally announced today—via a post on Mashable, a leading social media blog—plans to open an application programming interface (API) for @SF311, the innovative initiative that allows the city’s tech savvy residents to report maintenance concerns via Twitter. (I covered the June announcement here.)

Dubbed the “Open 311 Platform,” the city is hoping that software developers will “build applications on top of [@SF311],” according to Mayor Newsom’s blog post, with the goals of “1) [getting] request data from the 311 system, and 2) [submitting] new service requests to city departments.”

The benefits are mutual. Developers will now have the ability to easily create a wide range of mash-ups and metric programs with the data, as well as applications that can be disseminated to the general public to report incidents directly back into @SF311. (Of course, there’s money to be made, so that’s a major incentive.) For the city, more reports and analytics will flow, resulting in a better product and enhanced responsiveness to citizen complaints.

While not built on a government API, software developers have already created applications that allow residents to report quality of life issues to municipalities, including New York City’s 311 Pix iPhone, Pittsburg’s iBurgh, and the District of Columbia’s DC 311. SeeClickFix, a privately developed application, is another example.

Introduced at TechCrunch50, the tech community is buzzing about CitySourced, an iPhone application that eases the maintenance reporting process, by allowing users to snap a picture of a problem (graffiti, for example), which is then routed directly to the municipality, via a user-friendly process. The difference between CitySourced and other iPhone applications is its robust metrics platform, as well as its scaling potential, with thousands of potential municipal clients. Think of it as crowdsourcing on a grand scale.

The beauty of the Open 311 Platform and the iPhone applications, which are not built on top of a government API, is the ability to quickly compile metrics to determine where the problem areas exist. And, civic duty is now not only fun, but it’s also effortless; just tap on your iPhone.

The Open 311 Platform is not just a tool to stoke quality of life improvements. It’s also a revolutionary concept, and depending on its success (which, with the voracious start-up culture in San Francisco, all indications point to a resounding “yes”), it could become a model for cities everywhere. Provide the entrepreneurs with raw data, let them hack away, and wonderful applications will result.

Many cities gush about being “on the internet,” but there’s much more than just posting meeting announcements on an antiquated website. As I wrote in another post about @SF311, “there’s a substantial difference between being tech savvy and actively establishing open lines of communication.” In other words, show, don’t tell.

However, an impediment to such an initiative becoming mainstream is that a municipality will only follow Newsom’s lead if it intends to promote transparency and accountability in its functioning. Politically, “opening” government could be detrimental to elected officials if reported incidents are not being addressed—especially if logs are easily accessible to the public.

Although accessibility is a paramount objective of civic applications, a paradox emerges. Anecdotal evidence suggests that iPhone users are only a small percentage of mobile users, so the rest are naturally shut-out from using the technology. Nevertheless, as technology adapts, solutions should arise to combat this issue.

Hopefully, enough traction will build under these civic applications, resulting in citizens nationwide demanding that their governments participate. We’re almost a decade into the 21st century, so why not? Improve our communities, while concurrently keeping us civic-minded technologists happy.

I’ll reiterate the conclusion of my June @SF311 post: