Support the Open311 API. Take the pledge.

As San Francisco and Washington D.C. prepare to launch their new APIs we’d like to have other cities and managers of 311 services show their support for implementing an interoperable standard for these APIs. The more cities get behind this effort, the better for developers, for city budgets, and for citizens. Showing a critical mass … Continued

San Francisco and D.C. Set to Launch Open311 APIs

Both San Francisco and Washington D.C.are preparing to release their Open311 APIs next month. Over the past several months, Alissa Black and Jay Nath  having been working within the technology team in San Francisco to incorporate public feedback for the development of the Open311 API. The current proposal can be seen on the wiki. Dmitry … Continued

Reporting Issues For All Occasions

The earthquake in Haiti can be an important reminder of role that communications technology plays in dealing with crises. I also think this is an opportunity to consider how our use of day to day technologies can better prepare us for responding intelligently when there is an emergency. As described by this Urban Omnibus story … Continued

Open311 DevCamp Follow-Up

This follow-up is long overdue, but progress has certainly not slowed. My initial DevCamp follow-up pointed to most of the resources that came out of the event, but I’ll run through them again. The video stream of the DevCamp is available here. The IRC log is available here. Some of the main wiki pages created … Continued

Open311 DevCamp Closing Summaries

We’re still in the process of collecting all of the material from the DevCamp, structuring it on the wiki, and recharging the mailing list to coordinate next steps for developing the API. For now, this video provides a good summary of some of the things that were covered at the event. The video is broken … Continued

Create real-world issue reporting system

Last year Google created Project 10^100 as a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. It took them a while to review all of the submissions because they received about 150,000 spanning 172 countries. A number of the submissions described similar ideas, so Google narrowed them down to … Continued

Open311 is a Specification for an Open Platform

“Open 311” has been used to refer to a few different things. To clarify, the intent of this website is to create a standard specification to turn 311 services into an open platform. I call this Open311, but really, it’s is a standard that does not yet exist. There won’t be any one specific app … Continued

Open311 at the Gov 2.0 Expo and Summit

I presented Open311 and the need for a standard at the Gov 2.0 Expo and it turned out that providing 311-like services as platforms was a continuous thread throughout both the Expo and the Summit that followed. Ben Berkowitz also gave a presentation at the Gov 2.0 Expo talking about SeeClickFix. Tim O’Reilly’s opening keynote … Continued

Open311.org Launches

This website is meant to facilitate an international effort to build open interoperable systems that allow citizens to more directly interact with their cities. Many 311 systems provide a broad range of information and services, but currently the primary focus here is coordinating a standardized, open-access, read/write model for citizens to report non-emergency issues. The … Continued