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 Kachaev in Washington D.C. is also preparing to relaunch the D.C. API incorporating the changes of their v2 draft while paying attention to the API spec that San Francisco has worked on in an attempt to start working out interoperability between cities.

Progress has also been made on ways to provide integration between geographically disparate APIs. The current proposal is an approach modeled after DNS and reverse-geocoding called GeoWeb DNS. The way this fits in with the Open311 API is illustrated in this system architecture diagram. There’s a description of the GeoWeb DNS service on the wiki and a reference implementation is available at: http://geodns.www.open311.org

The San Francisco team is holding their final public conference call before they launch their Open311 API. The call is open for all to join and provide feedback, comments, and ideas as they move from their development phase to the actual launch. The invitation for the call as posted on the sfgov.org website:

Public Conf Call 2/25 @ 10AM PST

Please join our public conference call this Thursday @ 10AM Pacific.

Dial in: 641.715.3625
Pin: 813951#

The topics to be discussed are:

  • design spec
  • other cities pledge to use standard Open311 protocol
  • feedback on a few modifications we may make to spec (addition of metadata call)
  • open questions
  • mailing list Please join!

Please join the conversation and help ensure that the APIs are well equipped to serve these cities and the developers working with them.