On October 24th, The Open Planning Project will host Open311 DevCamp at their NYC office. Please register to attend either in-person or remotely via Eventbrite (it’s free). This is a DevCamp style un-conference to coordinate a standard specification for 311 services. Washington D.C’s 311 API will be a major case-study for developing a more universal 311 API. In general, this DevCamp will be an opportunity to discuss and develop what’s needed to make 311 services more accessible and for cities to share knowledge for mutual benefit. The event is intended for developers, project managers, and policy makers involved with 311 services. We encourage those involved with 311 services from all cities to take part. If you cannot attend in person, please sign up as a remote attendee and we’ll provide you with information about how to connect to the DevCamp remotely.

Please register at http://open311.eventbrite.com
The wiki page for the event is http://wiki.open311.org/Open311DevCamp

Project 10^100 - 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 16 core ideas. Two of these ideas describe what we’re doing here with Open311. The more broad idea is to Collect and Organize the World’s Urban Data which includes the example of “creating a website where residents can text or upload photos that highlight city issues,” but the idea that is truly spot on is to create a real-world issue reporting system. Please vote for these ideas (before October 8th!) and let’s use Open311 as an organization to bring this to life.

Google’s Project 10^100: Create real-world issue reporting system

Build an issue-reporting website that lets people report problems to proper authorities. When software testers find errors, they generally submit them to a tool which automatically routes them to the right team to be fixed. Implementing proposals for this idea might involve creating an analogous system for the real world that lets anyone report a problem of any kind (e.g., a dangerous pothole), and routes problems it deems sufficiently important to the proper authorities (e.g., the relevant road agency). The aim would be to incorporate all the niche applications that users suggested, including reporting crimes to the police and environmental issues to local governments.

“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 or API implementation that can be referred to as “The Open 311,” but as an open platform there will be a multitude of Open311-compliant apps that work with a multitude of Open311 API implementations. This is the architecture of an open platform.

An Open Platform

The web and democracy as open platforms

Much of what distinguishes a platform from an open platform is covered in a recent post that describes the web and democracy as examples of open platforms, but the fundamental point is that an open platform can’t exist until an open standard does.  In the context of 311, an open platform is one that makes service requests publicly available and enables participation through a read/write interface. Additionally, an open standard gives this platform complete accessibility, collective innovation, and a distributed model with scalability and stability.

The Many Faces of Open311

Some of the ambiguity regarding “open 311″ was brought out at TechCrunch 50 during the launch of a new 311 service called CitySourced. After CitySourced founder Jason Kiesel presented the product a panel asked questions and offered feedback. Tim O’Reilly was one of the panelists and said:

I’m a huge fan of this type of application and ever since Thomas Steinberg built FixmyStreet.com in the UK it’s been pretty clear that this was the way to go. But I worry a little bit about the defensibility of the product. What’s your thinking about how you become a market leader? Is this something you just have to get out there and sell to a lot of people first? Because there’s so many people working in this area: SeeClickFix, a lot of app contests being run by cities are producing open 311 apps, there’s the open 311 API. What’s your competitive advantage and how are you going to go to market in such a way that you become a viable business?

Responding to Tim’s mention of open 311, Jason says:

Open 311: it’s great, I would say that the UI needs some work; overall, if a city adopts that platform, they’re locking themselves into their city alone. Our platform works nationwide, so if you download the app and you’re in the city of San Jose and you’re in LA and you report something in LA, it goes to LA. So that’s a big competitive advantage that we have.

Tim mentioned “the open 311 API”, but currently there are actually two drafts of APIs which call themselves “The Open311 API.” One is provided by a company, the SeeClickFix API, and one is provided by a city, the Washington D.C. 311 API.  I’m not quite sure which UI Jason was referring to. In the case of D.C.’s 311 system, there are now a variety of different UIs. Much of the intent of opening 311 is to not be tied to any specific UI. As a standardized specification, Open311 would abstract the services of 311 systems into a consistent open platform that anyone can build a UI for.

Open311 is not meant to refer to a specific app or any one incarnation of 311 services. Instead Open311 intends to be a specification of an open platform for 311 services. This difference may seem subtle, but it’s an important one. It’s the difference between closed platforms like the iPhone and open platforms like Android or the web which are enabled by open standards: the Android operating system, HTML, and HTTP. The challenge we need to address is creating an open standard by looking at APIs like those offered by D.C. and SeeClickFix and coordinating the commonalities of different city infrastructure to distill core requirements for a universal 311 API. Once this core standard is defined, new user interfaces and custom workflows can be created by anyone and shared between cities to provide distributed innovation.

Open Platforms are Distributed

Innovation and infrastructure is distributed in an open platform. Diagram is based on PuSH and the internet's architecture.

Jason Kiesel provided a good point, in order to guarantee that the platform actually connects to all cities and can provide a UI that works anywhere requires coordination with each city. Tom Steinberg put this eloquently when he asked us to build FixMyStreet in this country:

Your citizens deserve services that have that kind of usability of a single national service; that hides the splinter of federalism. And it’s challenging because of the federalism; which is precisely why you should do it. Because if you can overcome that you will have done something amazing and you will have a really simple example that will give legitimacy to investment in loads of other things.

It could be beneficial to have government coordinate this routing on a national level, but we don’t necessarily need higher level government to provide a single unifying force.  Tim O’Reilly alluded to this in mentioning the government’s role in providing root DNS servers within the context of 311 services:

Can gov get in the business of providing some minimal services (a la the root servers of the DNS, originally govt chartered) in such a way that the public takes the ball and does everything from there.

Like DNS and the web, a distributed 311 platform can be facilitated with not only multiple inputs and endpoints, but also multiple hubs that route information. This is the underlying architecture of the internet and it’s the model now making its way to web technologies using an open stack that distributes streams with real-time methods like PuSH feeds. It’s no accident that I mimicked the diagram of the PuSH model to use as a visualization for distributed 311 services in my Gov 2.0 talk.

By not depending on a central server, or even a central router, distributed systems are more stable and more scalable. Imagine if multiple major cities relied on one single centralized service to provide their 311 platform. What would happen if this service suffered catastrophic hardware failure or if it were run by a business that wasn’t financially sustainable? These are things that happen on the web. Ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking service that competes with Delicious, but recently their infrastructure suffered a catastrophic hardware failure and all of the users’ bookmarks were lost. Similarly, Tr.im is a URL-shortening service that competes with Bit.ly, but recently they announced that they would be shutting down the service (and breaking all of their links) at the end of the year because they are not profitable. Even Twitter demonstrates its lack of stability on a regular basis and they’ve yet to prove that they are financially sustainable. Fortunately, there are signs of new life at Ma.gnolia and Tr.im, but preventing these types of systemic failures is exactly why the internet is designed with a distributed architecture.

Additionally, the internet has proven that the distributed model helps foster new innovation and new business while providing a better user experience by guaranteeing interoperability.  A distributed model does not preclude software as a service just as the internet did not prevent companies from leasing infrastructure and selling hosting services. This is a model that simultaneously promotes growth and prevents systemic problems, but it’s only possible with cooperation.

A Call to Action

This is a crucial opportunity to think globally and act locally. Please join the effort to establish an Open311 standard; speak up on our mailing list or edit the wiki. For this to work, we really need to hear from cities. Describe your city’s 311 infrastructure and how collective action can improve these city services. We have organized an Open311 DevCamp on October 24th in New York City with developers of 311 systems from both inside and outside city governments, so please come to that and help move this forward. As a proactive developer community we can help build better communities for all.

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 emphasized the role of government as the provider of open platforms, platforms that we the people could build applications on top of:

Government as a platform means an end to the design of only complete, closed “applications.” Instead the government should provide fundamental services on which we, the people, (also known as “the market”) build the applications.

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey mentioned his background in dispatch communications and cited the utility of something like Twitter for 311 services. When asked if there’s anything government does that could exploit Twitter, Jack responded:

I think we’re making some steps in the 311 services. You have people roaming all over these metropolises, all over this country, all over the world, reporting what they’re doing and what they’re seeing in front of them. And being able to quickly amass some narrative or some knowledge from those updates is really interesting. You have a pulse of what’s happening in very specific locations around very specific topic. And I think that’s one of the challenges of the developer community, of our users, and of the company to build something that really captures that and makes it intelligible.

Tom Steinberg of MySociety described the experience providing FixMyStreet in the UK, the very first instance of an open 311 service. Tom’s talk then went on to express the opportunity and the challenge of bringing this to the US:

Build FixMyStreet in this country. Your citizens deserve services that have that kind of usability of a single national service; that hides the splinter of federalism. And it’s challenging because of the federalism; which is precisely why you should do it. Because if you can overcome that you will have done something amazing and you will have a really simple example that will give legitimacy to investment in loads of other things. People understand potholes and getting them fixed. If you can make that measurably better so they say, “Do you remember the time before that?” then the likelihood that they’ll say, please can we have some more of that and that the money and the energy will flow in that direction just goes up a lot. You can even have the name FixMyStreet.gov if you want, we won’t sue.

Here’s the video of my presentation:

Since the last update here on 311 technology, a number of new apps have been released from different cities and services. Here’s a quick rundown:

SeeClickFix released an iPhone app to interface with their service.

New York City released their first official mobile 311 app with the 311 Pix iPhone app.

Pittsburg launched their first mobile 311 app as an iPhone app called iBurgh with suggestions of spreading their technology to other cities.

DC announced the winner of the final round of the Apps for Democracy contest. The DC 311 iPhone and Facebook app created by Victor Shilo was the winner. Other DC 311 apps and links to their source code can be found in the D.C. apps section of the wiki.

CitySourced launched as a new software-as-a-service offering similar to SeeClickFix with a presentation at TechCrunch 50. CitySourced is starting with iPhone based input and Palm Pre, Blackberry, Android, and Windows Mobile versions on their way (video). The TechCrunch pitch also included their first client on stage, city council member Pete Constant from San Jose (press release).

A running list of 311 apps and services is maintained on the wiki. Please add or update the listing if you know of more.

To further discuss the issues and opportunities surrounding Open 311, we’d like to extend an open invitation to the developer, government, and interested citizen communities to the first Open 311 Summit.

At this point, the agenda and format are open for discussion, as are the exact dates, but we are thinking about sometime in late October, 2009 in NYC.  If you’re interested in attending or have any suggestions, please drop a note in the comments or head over to the Open 311 Discussion List.

Thanks!

In a few minutes, Philip Ashlock from The Open Planning Project will be discussing Open311 at the Gov 2.0 Expo Showcase.

Phil will be presenting as part of the “Government as a Partner” panel, along with representatives from Arkansas Recovery Portal, Neighbors for Neighbors, SeeClickFix, and BART.  You can view his slides below or download them here (PDF).

The Expo has been great so far, and Tim O’Reilly’s opening remarks definitely set the stage for a discussion of 311 as an open civic platform.  You can follow the live tweeting here.