The Open311 GeoReport v2 Spec Stabilizes

It’s been a while since there’s been an update here, but if you’ve watched the mailing list you’ve seen that work has continued to help ensure that the GeoReport v2 spec is clearly defined and stabilized. We’re almost ready to officially freeze the spec and many cities, companies, and developers have already been implementing the spec as currently defined. This includes San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston, and several systems including SeeClickFix, Lagan, Motorola PremierOne CSR, ISC HeyGov! (using Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online), and Connected Bits Citizens Connect. If you know of others working to implement the v2 spec please let us know on the mailing list or here in the comments.

Over the past few months there has been a lot of feedback on the spec to ensure that it’s consistent, complete, clearly documented, and is being aligned with best practices for API design. We’ve tried to make it clear that the spec is still in a beta testing phase to better inform implementers and to encourage”bug reports” and other feedback. While the spec is not perfect, it has stabilized and matured to reflect a healthy evolution from where this initiative began. This is meant to be an iterative process, so all feedback will help to continuously improve the spec.

We’ve also been working out better coordination among implementers to more effectively establish consensus about the stability and finalization of the spec. Part of this also relates to the way this initiative is structured and managed. We’re going to work to have this initiative more clearly defined and run based on the Apache/meritocratic model template from OSS Watch. We’ll also start bringing more of the issues regarding the spec into the bug tracker to help manage them through resolution.

As we approach finalization of this revision of the spec the next step is to make tools available to test compliance of implementations. A few of these tools are already being developed and we’ll be sure to make them easy to find here on the website when they’re complete.

Stay tuned, there will be more updates soon and in the meantime you can get more details on the mailing list.