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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.
Because it is an app. Like, the future! Also very cyber.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
Who calls anyone?
FTFA:
“It saves time, it gets results, and I love how I can follow the progress being made on the complaint,” said Dan Wroblewski, who lives on Detroit’s far west side and uses the app to report issues while patrolling his neighborhood.
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...
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.
Boston has had an app like this; it's called "Citizens Connect."
Essentially, it's a very half-assed ticketing system. You open a ticket, and that's it - you can't provide any further information, or challenge a request, or re-open it. There is only one action city worker can do - "close" the ticket. About the only thing they got right was not forcing people to select a category; a team of staffers handle that.
What people quickly discovered was that city workers would just close tickets, regardless of whether the work actually got done or not. So, what you saw increasingly were tickets that said "STOP CLOSING MY REQUESTS WITHOUT FIXING IT."
That said...it beats Cambridge, MA's system, which has horrendously poor geotagging and only accepts requests in a few limited, narrow issue categories.
I have three or four of these apps for the various cities I spend time in now. It's stupid. There is a national service set up, but cities don't like it because it provides a lot of reporting to the public. City workers don't like Joe Q Public seeing how long requests take to clear and stuff like that. Makes 'em look bad....
Please help metamoderate.
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!
moox. for a new generation.
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,
And by that I mean "Bankrupted by corrupt one-party machine politics, deindustrialization, and overly generous union pensions, and where the police can no longer afford to light up streetlights or to investigate any but the most serious crimes.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
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.
We've had this in major cities in Denmark for years. Really nice: spots vandalism or a broken light. Fire up the app. Take a photo. The app logs GPS and gives option to move found position on map. Add optional comment and press send. Then the app keeps track of ticket status.
Other stuff we've had for years includes sms/app based mobile payment between individuals and stores. Sms/app based purchase of stamps when sending letters. Tickets for train/bus. Etc.
Slashdot.org has really become a blast from the past :-)
The open source alternative would be https://www.fixmystreet.com/ It got many forks on github for other countries, and it was first made by mysociety in the UK. Currently that version is used in 8 countries.
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.
gman003 is correct on all counts. Photos and GPS coordinates make it easier for the workers to find the problem (some, but certainly not all, of the workers aren't very motivated & don't exactly look hard). It also allows anyone to see tickets, comment on them, or even reopen closed tickets. If something gets marked as resolved when it wasn't, any citizen can reopen that ticket and add a comment saying that is wasn't done.
Years ago, Detroit has a 311 system that was supposed to track complaints and give you a ticket number. Besides the obvious disadvantages of the phone system, a number of city departments did not participate so you never knew who to call. If you had to call the department directly, it wasn't always immediately obvious what number to call to report a problem and there was zero accountability.
As Dan mentioned in the article, the app does get results. The resolution times can vary depending on what type of issue it is and what department handles that. I've seen dumping issues take up to a week to get someone out to investigate but I've also seen pothole issues resolved within a couple days (previous response time was often measured in months if you were lucky).
I don't know how true it is, but I've also been told that the mayor watches the system and uses it to hold department heads accountable. I do know if something does go unresolved for a long time, I have proof that I can take to my city council member. Even though the departments don't technically report to the city council, getting a call from a council member's office does seem to motivate them.
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
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