Over 10,000 Problems Fixed In Detroit Thanks To Cellphone App (motorcitymuckraker.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Six months ago, Detroit's city officials launched a smartphone app called "Improve Detroit." The idea was to give residents a way to easily inform city hall of problems that needed to be fixed. For example: potholes, abandoned vehicles, broken hydrants and traffic lights, water leaks, and more. Since that time, over 10,000 issues have been fixed thanks to reports from that app. "Residents have long complained about city hall ignoring litter and broken utilities. But the app has provided a more transparent and direct approach to fixing problems." Perhaps most significant is its effect on the water supply: running water has been shut off to almost a thousand abandoned structures, and over 500 water main breaks have been located with the app's help. Crowd-sourced city improvement — imagine if apps like this become ubiquitous.

Comments

What?

[ArchieBunker]

How is this any different than calling them up and telling them what is broken?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who calls anyone?

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to wait for ppl to answer the phone, you have to call during office hours, they can ignore your complaint, it is difficult to track the progress..
It's like saying why do you need an app to bank when you can just call the bank...

Re:What?

[gman003]

Automatically goes into an issue-tracking system, instead of needing to be manually entered. Cutting out the person on the other end makes things faster, and lets more of the budget be put to fixing problems instead of overhead.

There may be other, lesser advantages. It could let them provide photos or GPS coordinates, or have an easier follow-up process to make sure the problem was actually fixed.

Re:What?

[Hadlock]

You get to skip the phone tree system, the hold music, the condescending tone of the person on the other side. You also get more accurate location information, and the whole system is routed directly in to an electronic ticketing system - no paper TPS reports required!

Re:What?

[fragMasterFlash]

How is this any different than calling them up and telling them what is broken?

Thank you for calling the City of Detroit. Para obtener instrucciones en español por favor presione 1 ahora. Your call is very important to us. Due to the current high volume of calls it will be approximately NINETY-ONE minutes until a representative is available to take your call. To leave your phone number for a call back instead press 3 now,

Re:What?

[swb]

In Minneapolis we have a "311" system which is supposed to serve a similar purpose -- report potholes, etc. I was just thinking how much better it would be if I could go stand right on top of this one pothole and get the GPS coordinates of it and send in a picture of it.

Re:What?

[hey!]

How is this any different than calling them up and telling them what is broken?

I can answer that. I've had a lot of experience fixing up information flows in public agencies. The difference is in what happens to the information in your call once it's in the hands of the agency. It often falls into an irrationally complex morass of criss-crossing processes. Watching a government or non-profit organization respond to a new piece of information can be like watching an individual pachinko ball drop through the machine's forest of pins, only you can be sure that it will eventually drop into the right slot, the question is will it make it there in time? The morass into which your request falls isn't designed; it has evolved, and chances are nobody has ever had the job of seeing whether what it has evolved into makes any sense -- until a new system is planned.

One way to think about an organization is to compare it to the best organizations of that kind. And the best governmental organizations excel at performing routine tasks. None that I have ever seen excel at reinventing themselves; that takes the introduction of an outside force. It also takes the eyes of an an outsider with a knack for seeing which processes generate value and which processes simply support other processes. That's not always clear. I've had clients, with a simultaneously smug and hopeless air, hand me a fat ream of "critical reports" that a system absolutely had to generate. The first time this happened I was alarmed given my slim budget, but I quickly learned to ask this question: which of these "reports" do you actually use to make decisions with? Inevitably causes the ream of "reports" to slim down to a half dozen or so.

But if the hundred or so other things in that stack aren't things the organization uses to make decisions with, then what are they and why are they produced? Inevitably the answer is that they're produced to carry data from one process to another -- something that a computer system can do without any marginal input of labor. That means that upwards of 90% of the office work can be eliminated.

The result of eliminating that work isn't (as is often feared) that jobs disappear; it's that the organization becomes orders of magnitude more responsive. I've worked with mosquito control agencies that went from sending an inspector out days or weeks after the report of a problem (by which time it is certainly past) to sending out an inspector the same day and if necessary a spray truck that very night. I've worked with non-profits where donations took weeks or months to be deposited go to depositing the check and sending out the thank you letter the very same day. It's not hard to be responsive when you have a system that gets the right information to the right person immediately; it's impossible when your systems take weeks to get you information you need right away.

How do things get that bad? Not because you have bad people. You start with inexperienced people who learn how to do their jobs from the people who came before them; and since nobody has a full view of the entire system they come to see their job as keeping the system running more or less as it has been. That's not because they're bad or stupid; it's the best anyone can do under the circumstances. When there's was a problem in their part of the system the do their best to patch that part so the problem goes away.

Experienced programmers will recognize this anti-pattern; it's called "lava flow". Eventually the system becomes more patch than productive process and the effort to keep it running approaches or exceeds the effort spent on doing things that are intrinsically valuable.

So yes, I absolutely believe installing a system, particular a system with mobile data input, can have a massive impact on a public agency's responsiveness. I've seen it happen repeatedly. Imagine you're in charge of dispatching workers to deal with problems, but all you hav

Re:Boston has an app like this. It's useless.

[Dutch Gun]

An app for this sort of thing is a cool idea, but of course, only if the app doesn't suck and the city actually makes an attempt to fix the issues it receives. Call me crazy, but I suspect the app's effectiveness will have a strong correlation with the local government's effectiveness in dealing with it's other day to day issues. Competent local governments will probably make good use of this technology. Incompetent local governments will continue to run things (including new programs like this) in a bumbling, half-assed fashion.

According to the article, in Detroit's system, the person who submitted the request can see the progress of the ticket item as it makes it's way through the system. That sort of feedback is important, as it lets people know they aren't being ignored. So, the city workers must have a way to update the status of individual requests as they process them. Seems like a reasonably good system.

I'm not sure how Boston's compared to that. It sounds like their system needs a way to allow users to give some feedback per ticket, so they can let the city know who's not actually doing their jobs.

Re:So did they shut off the water to the buildings

[TurboStar]

Detroit gets real winters. Abandoned buildings aren't heated. Freezing water expands and breaks pipes. Now the building has structural damage in addition to wasting clean water. This is a win for everyone, including the squatters who won't be living with mold or falling through water-damaged floors. It's easy to bring in water in jugs and any drains will still work. You can even make the toilets work. Annoying, sure, but hardly uninhabitable.