The new 311 Mobile App allows citizens to have real-time collaboration with their government.
- Mayor Rawlings-Blake

The City of Baltimore has a long history of leading the way with 311. In 1996 they were the first city to deploy the 311 short code and unified call center and in 1999 the city launched CitiStat pioneering the use of statistics based performance management. Now both of these innovations can be amplified by a much more open and collaborative relationship between Baltimoreans and their government through Open311.

This week Baltimore announced that they have deployed the Open311 API placing them among the select cities which have implemented the GeoReport v2 standard. The city also launched a mobile app to provide its citizens with a much richer and more engaging interaction with the 311 system and, by extension, with their neighborhoods.

The new Baltimore 311 app can be found on the App Store for iPhone as well as on the Android Marketplace. There’s also a simple web app which provides a Twitter-like newsfeed of other reports.

With the Open311 API any developer can create an app that can integrate directly with the city’s 311 system. If you’d like to start building an app that connects to the Open311 API in Baltimore you can get an API key and get connected to their staging server. The Baltimore endpoints have also been added to the full list of Open311 GeoReport v2 Servers.

The launch of Baltimore’s Open311 apps and API was aided by the fact that they were able to leverage the Open311 compliant solutions provided by Motorola CSR and Connected Bits. Baltimore CIO Rico Singleton went as far as to say that their choice of software solutions was influenced by the interoperability provided by the standard.

With these moves, Baltimore demonstrated it is still at the forefront of urban innovation. I’m eager to see how the city leverages Open311 and continues to build on these successful and influential models for civic engagement and management.

This post originally appeared on the Civic Commons blog.

David Eaves wrote a great post today highlighting the opportunity for Open311 integration with the Ushahidi platform. I ended up responding with a long comment and figured I’d post it here as well - particularly since we’re long overdue for an update and because I’ve covered many of the cities, vendors, and companies working on Open311 implementation, but haven’t covered the recent wave of open source efforts. In any case, here’s my response to David’s post:

Thanks for writing this up David. I expressed a similar sentiment in a post I wrote last year called Reporting Issues for All Occasions and during the RHOK event you linked to I did in fact finish initial integration of the Open311 GeoReport v2 spec with Ushahidi. There’s a demo of it up at http://ushahidi.georeport.org with familiar GeoReport endpoints being

• http://ushahidi.georeport.org/georeport/v2/requests.xml
• http://ushahidi.georeport.org/georeport/v2/services.xml

This isn’t complete though and it’s not packaged in a way that integrates well with the rest of the Ushahidi codebase. I’m long overdue in better coordinating this with folks like Erik and others on the Ushahidi developer list where I’ve been lurking, but there are a number of efforts underway which will surely bring more of full Open311 support to Ushahidi. If there are folks interested in this, please let us know on our respective mailing lists:

• http://lists.open311.org/groups/discuss
• http://list.ushahidi.com

It’s also worth noting that there are a number of other open source systems much like Ushahidi which have been working on support for Open311 GeoReport v2. These include two of the FixMyStreet codebases and Mark-a-spot.

• http://www.fiksgatami.no/open311
• http://fixmystreet.org.nz/api
• http://restclient.markaspot.org/

Also see more open source Open311 efforts on the wiki and broader context from my recent Civic Commons talk at OKCon.

I should also state two of the main shortcomings with Ushahidi in it’s current state which I hope can be addressed with more developer involvement. 1) Ushahidi is great for simple reporting of problems, but needs more robust features to triage, assign, and track them 2) Ushahidi doesn’t currently use a true geospatial database, so you are limited in your ability to do things like query reports by a “geo-fence” (a polygon).

Accommodating features like this was part of our thinking in providing the benefit of a geospatial database for the Trac issue tracking system with GeoTrac and I think things like that can be part of a diverse ecosystem of issue tracking systems and Open311 implementations.

Currently, Ushahidi has the broadest number of international deployments and developers, so in my mind it’s one of the best places to focus for Open311 integration and it’s where I plan to put a great deal of my attention this year, but ultimately the goal is to let a diverse ecosystem form on top of a common platform.