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Crowdsourcing the Department of Public Works
blackbearnh writes "Usually, Gov 2.0 deals mainly with outward transparency of government to the citizens. But SeeClickFix is trying to drive data in the other direction, letting citizens report and track neighborhood problems as mundane as potholes, and as serious as drug dealers. In a recent interview, co-founder Jeff Blasius talked about how cities such as New Haven and Tucson are using SeeClickFix to involve their citizens in identifying and fixing problems with city infrastructure. 'We have thousands of potholes fixed across the country, thousands of pieces of graffiti repaired, streetlights turned on, catch basins cleared, all of that basic, broken-windows kind of stuff. We've seen neighborhood groups form based around issues reported on the site. We've seen people get new streetlights for their neighborhood, pedestrian improvements in many different cities, and all-terrain vehicles taken off of city streets. There was also one case of an arrest. The New Haven Police Department attributed initial reports on SeeClickFix to a sting operation that led to an arrest of two drug dealers selling heroin in front of a grammar school.'"
they might fill the drug dealers with asphalt and chase the potholes out of the neighborhood.
I'll just take this time to point out that I've never heard of anyone selling liquor in front of an elementary school. If you want to get heroin off the streets, put it in well regulated stores instead.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If you email or call the city, it's between you and the city.
If you use this site, it's among you, the city, and everyone else using the city. So whereas now the city would just ignore you cause they don't give a shit (like where I live), this might just provide sufficient public shame to get something accomplished.
I'm not naive enough to assume the magic of the intertubes will fix everything, but as ideas go, this isn't a bad one and has some potential as a responsiveness check on municipal government.
After deciding that it was hopeless dealing with my neighbor, I went to call city hall. I left something like five different messages with the department that I presumed was responsible. At some point, while waiting on hold and getting different answers about what I could do,...
And what was touched on is that it's public
After that, make sure someone is receiving an alert. If you go to your neighborhood or city, you can click the "Who's Watching" tab and you can see if your mayor or your public works department is already receiving alerts. And if not, you can sign them up. The last step is just reporting issues.
NPR reported on this about a month ago.
It's pretty embarrassing to the bureaucrats when their incompetence is publicly visible.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
... are probably their own local governments.
"Click here to have your corrupt mayor tarred and feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail."
. . . or . . .
"Click here to endorse a public works program, which nobody wants, because nobody needs . . . Monorail!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
But I *liked* the heroin and potholes.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Alcohol's a cross between not-that-bad and impossible to regulate.
We seem to be doing a better job of it than heroin.
Heroin is pretty fucking toxic.
Heroin is actually quite non-toxic. If your breathing is supported, you can survive pretty much any level of an opiate. It's not toxic to the liver, or pretty much any other organ.
We're talking a chemical with no benefit, that makes you literally need it all the time to even stay on a normal level once you're hooked
But it's worth mentioning that with dependence comes tolerance. When an opiate addict is maintained on the dose they need, they can carry out an otherwise normal life. Dr. William Halsted, for instance, had a brilliant surgical career and co-founded Johns Hopkins while maintaining himself on morphine. That doesn't happen with alcoholics.
if you cut it off completely after a certain point, you die from withdrawal.
That is simply not true. Unless your health is already seriously compromised it is not possible to die from opiate withdrawal.
Heroin will do it way easy; and the natural course of exposure is to tend towards that addiction, strongly. It's also much easier to overdose.
It's pretty easy to avoid an overdose, if you know what dose you're taking. Problem is, black market heroin is un-measured. Someone who could drop into a pharmacy and pick up a premeasured dose of heroin would be very unlikely to die from overdose.
This is a different problem than liquor, just like carrying a small rocket launcher is a different problem than carrying a 6 bullet revolver.
It's different, but not altogether worse. Heroin is easier to get addicted to, but the addiction is not as bad. Alcohol makes people more violent. Heroin makes people very mellow. It's easier to overdose on heroin, but you don't see the same sort of chronic toxicity you do with alcohol. You can't objectively claim that one is worse than another.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I reside in Tucson, and in south-tucson, and ironically, it being the drug portal; you know with all the mexican cartels trying to lay claim to this gateway, the number one thing i found my fellow tucsonans complaining about, more important than drugs: is our Potholes, i guess the only pot they care about is the one they drive over.
Of all the things I've lost; I miss my mind the most. - Mark Twain
Alcohol regulation gets fucking stupid.
We have a (responsible!) liquor store chain in my town. They have a store that is ~1400ft (as the crow flies) from an elementary school. Never a record of the store ever selling to minors, and they've got a store policy of catching and reporting fake ID's to the police.
Last year, the idiot town council changed the limits on liquor licenses from 700ft to 1500 ft, and changed it from "shortest path" to "as the crow flies" measurement, then tried to get the store's liquor license retroactively revoked on the grounds that they didn't meet the new (illegally ex-post-facto) legal standard.
It's ridiculous. But then what do you expect when you live in a town dominated by "no drinking, no dancing, no fun, the-stick-up-our-ass-has-a-stick-up-its-ass" Southern Baptists?
It's still government and it's still the source of everything that is wrong with this country.
I've heard tales of a mythical land called Somalia whee men are free to do as they please. Wait it is real, and it isn't a nice place to visit.
The fact that it's so addictive and harmful are reasons to regulate.
I've lost a few friends and family to heroin. It's already here. The $80B we spend trying to keep it away only puts helpless addicts into contact with unscrupulous armed drug dealers.
If there were pharmacies that were secure like banks where addicts could go and buy limited amounts, we'd be much better off. Does it totally fix the problem? Absolutely not, but I'd like to know that my local junkie can peaceably go down to the store and buy his fix of clean, regulated regulated smack for the day and offset my taxes a bit.
Cigarettes are a -great- model, they're -maddeningly- addictive. I've collected wet butts off the ground, dried them in the toaster, and rolled them in wrapping paper to get my fix (long ago). I'll gladly pay $9 for a pack that costs under $1 to make if it keeps me sane. I want the same model for heroin addicts.
Also, it's not the -users- of drugs out there that tend to be violent (in my experience), it's the dealers and runners. Cut the dealers out of the loop and replace them with secure distributors and bank-type retail and you've just grown the economy -and- cut a huge amount of crime and lowered enforcement costs.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
The more civic functions that we are able to move online, the better. I live in Long Beach, CA and the city has a graffiti hotline. The one time I used it, the graffiti that I reported was cleaned up less than 24 hours later. The system involves having to leave a voice mail, and the recording time is way too short. It would be much easier to be able to upload digital pictures, or even click the relative location on a map and type in a short description. It would make dispatching the tickets easier too on the city's end.
I'm sure that there will be some who decry the big brother potential of the system. They will worry about nosey neighbors and the spectre of authoritarianism intruding into their lives. I wonder how many of those people actually live in neighborhoods that are right on the border between "nice" and "not so nice". In those neighborhoods, community activism and participation are key in reversing the slide toward the "not so nice" end of the spectrum. All it takes for a neighborhood to decay is for the residents to remain apathetic for long enough. Soon enough all of the "little" things start to add up.
We have a similar thing in the UK, called Fix My Street. I used it once. I got a form email after a couple of days, followed promptly by nothing at all. They finally got around to fixing the problem I reported after a few months, but never bothered to reply to say so. Zero human communication. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's all very well setting something like this up, but the government has to be committed to the project for it to work. Setting up a website is only the small part, getting them to actually follow up is another matter. It's all too easy for a politician to pay lip service to ideas like this, but fail to adequately support the effort after the headlines have been made.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
It sounds very like http://www.fixmystreet.com/ by the wonderful mySociety which has been running in the UK for a while now, and working quite well, all for free. It's effective because it streamlines the often awful web reporting mechanism that city councils have into a single system that handles the reporting and the public presence of the report that other people can see (to see how effective the council is).
It's like if there's an absence of a governmental power the most powerful will become the government...
And the powerful didn't get to be powerful by being Mr. Niceguy.
Portland has been doing such a thing for a few months now through an iPhone app appropriately named "City of Portland Citizen Reports". Allows users to upload photos with descriptions and tag them with GPS coordinates. The description pulled from the iTunes page:
Citizen Reports is a direct result of Mayor Adams and the City of Portland’s call for more open data and interactions with the citizens of Portland. Citizen Reports is used by citizens to report and request service calls to city assets and infrastructure, including issues with parks, pot holes, traffic lights, street lights, catch basins, and graffiti. Additional city assets and service request types will be added over time.
Using an iPhone, citizens can access this easy-to-use interface to the City of Portland’s issue reporting infrastructure. Citizens select the type of issue to report, take a photo (or upload an existing one), geo-locate the issue via GPS or interactive map, add comments, and send their report directly to the responsible bureau for resolution. Citizens can also view issues they have previously submitted and check the status or resolution of the issue.
Citizen Reports is a small but important step in allowing citizens to participate in expediting the City of Portland's awareness and resolution of various issues. Citizen Reports is available for free within the Apple App Store.
Locals repair roads!
http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2010/04/07/vladivostok-road-repair-flashmob/
Go, Russia!
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
> Alcohol makes people more violent. Heroin makes people very mellow.
Wrong, and wrong. In many cultures, alcohol that makes people mellow, and sometimes there's something else that makes them aggressive. In one peculiar culture, imported western alcohol consumed in cities made people aggressive and traditional alcohol consumed in villages made them mellow.
Learned effects, people. We know it from comparative anthropology, and we know it from large, double blind studies performed in the sixties and seventies: alcohol changes you the way you expect it to change you.
People use the supposed effects largely as excuses. Alcohol gives you the excuse to say what you want to say, or occasionally punch who you want to punch. Someone who beats his wife when drinking isn't exactly excused, but he's called a drunk. If he did it when cold sober he would be called a psychopath instead. Both alcohol and cannabis are useful excuses for your grades not being as good as they "could" be.
What about heroin? Heroin, the king of chemical excuses around here, gives a rather plausible explanation for your life being a mess. (If you've heard the life story of a couple of street addicts, you know there's usually more than enough explanations already, but it's more appealing to be a victim of a powerful chemical than just not coping with a messed-up life. )
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.