Fred Wilson, successful venture capital investor and one of the leading voices on the internet, posted about how to make city services more customer-friendly. 311, as you likely know, is a non-emergency phone number residents can use to notify city government of issues in need of attention.
311 was first introduced in Baltimore and, used in conjunction with the much hyped discussed CitiStat, has helped reduce the cost of delivering city services to Baltimore residents. Fred Wilson makes a case for advancing 311 services to allow city residents to send 311 requests and notices via Twitter. Wilson thinks 311 should be updated to allow residents to interact with city officials more efficiently. He writes:
We had a pothole in our neighborhood that I passed every day on my way
to the subway. It was a big one and I’d watch car after car pound the
hell out of their undercarriage as they made their way from Hudson onto
Bethune street. One day I stopped and snapped this photo with my
Blackberry and posted it to Flickr (and then automatically to Twitter):
I added the following to the Flickr headline which became the tweet:
Of course I could have called 311, like our Mayor does, and reported the pothole. But doing it this way does a bunch of things;
1)
It saves the cost of staffing large call centers because computers can
handle most of the processing of messages like this. There will still
need to be humans at some part of this process, but the front end can
certainly be automated.
2) You get an image of the pothole which should help the crews who fix them evaluate the worst ones and prioritize.
3)
The photo and the twitter message is out there for anyone to see.
Ideally this message would get routed, via something like our portfolio
company outside.in, to the various
local media in the neighborhood. If the messages have enough metadata
in them, you could even create pages of local media based on the most
common neighborhood issues (crime, infrastructure, schools, parks, etc)
4)
The public discussion about the photo and related posts could be
aggregated to create even more metadata and further identify the
highest priority issues.
We see this “public channel” in action already with services like Comcast Cares
on Twitter. Anyone can pick up the phone and call Comcast and tell them
that their cable service isn’t working. But the only people who know
about that are the person making the call and call center rep taking
it. When someone posts on Twitter that their cable service isn’t
working and directs the message to Comcast Cares, many people see that.
Some of them may be other Comcast customers who might find out that
their cable isn’t working either. And as Comcast Cares elevates the
issue, gets it fixed, and reports back, everyone gets to see that too.
It’s a huge win for Comcast. Anything that can make a cable company
look better is a great thing and the use of the public channel is
exactly that.
The public channel is just developing. It’s in its
infancy. Services like Twitter and Facebook are building key elements
of it. But we need a lot more infrastructure to make this happen. I do
not believe that the way this will happen is the creation of
“enterprise services” that will be sold to local governments. I think
we’ll see things like GetSatisfaction and Uservoice develop that are consumer facing first and foremost that governments will be forced to adopt.
Could the City of Buffalo adapt to the latest technology and make services more efficient by using the latest in web-based communication?