311 Advocate

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	Mayor Bloomberg signs bill requiring monthly reporting of 311 measures by community district. The Mayor was joined by (left to right) City Council Policy Analyst Bruce Lai, Council Members Gale Brewer and Leroy Comrie from the Committee on Technology in Government and Larry Knafo, Deputy Commissioner, DoITT and head of the 311 project.

On Thursday May 19, Mayor Bloomberg signed Int. No. 174-A requiring the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) to make available periodic reports regarding data collected from the 311 Citizen Service Center. This bill was strongly endorsed by community boards throughout the city and was passed by the City Council 50-0. It is important legislation, for increases puclic access to city information and helps citizens understand the level of service and the types of problems reported about their neighborhood.

Councilwoman Brewer, the Chair of the Committee on Technology in Government stated "Community boards will now have current and extensive data to help them perform their duties." Her remarks echoed the sentiments of the Mayor, other council members and the many citizens who have lobbied for the bill's passage.

While Int. No. 174-A is a significant improvement over the selection of 311 system-wide statistics currently available on the City's website (see the My Neighborhood Statistics page where the input of an address returns some interesting neighborhood data), it has its limitations. By focusing on the community district level, it still falls short of allowing citizens the ability to understand what is going on in their immediate vicinity. Larry Knafo, the head of DoiTT's 311 effort agreed this was not the final destination. Citng the increased use of geosupport tools, he said "This is an important step, but we understand it is only a beginning. Eventually, we want to make appropriate data available on a block by block level."

On Wednesday, May 11, 2005, the full New York City Council voted to pass Int. No. 174-A, 50-0.  Int. No. 174-A "requir(es) the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) to make available periodic reports regarding data collected from the 311 Citizen Service Center." 

Within seven business days from the end of each month, DoITT shall submit to each community board a list of:

• all requests for service that were identified to have occurred in the respective community district received by the 311 Citizen Service Center during the immediately preceding month; and
  
• all unresolved requests for service from prior months.
  

Such reports shall be submitted in electronic format and shall include, but not be limited to, for each request for service:

• the request for service category;
  
• the agency or agencies to which the request for service was directed; and,
  
• the current status of the request for service, where such information can be directly accessed by the 311 citizen service system.
  

In addition, DoITT is required to convene a quarterly meeting of representatives from each community board to discuss the content and format of the reports.

This is a significant step in making government more transparent and understandable to the average citizen as well as to the members of the community boards. It is expected that the Mayor will sign the legislation shortly. For a complete description of the amendment and a summary of its requirements see May 2 Briefing Paper put out by the City Council.

Congratulations to the chair Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer and the other members of the the Comittee on Technology in Government who sheparded this bill through committee and the full council.

There is a bill (proposed Int. No. 174-A) currently in the City Council related to the making of 311 data more accessible to the public. Originally discussed in June 2004 by the Committee on Technology in Government, the intention is to increase 311 information available by requiring the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) to publish monthly reports breaking down the calls by geographical area (borough, zip code and community district). The intent is to provide additional data to community boards to carry out their duties of community planning, community advocacy and constituent service.

According to the NYC charter, the community boards have the following responsibilities:

• Assist city departments and agencies in communicating with and transmitting information to the people of the district;
  
• Prepare comprehensive and special purpose plans for the growth, improvement and development of the community district;
  
• Prepare and submit … an annual statement of community district needs … and its recommendations for programs, projects, or activities to meet those needs;
  
• Consult with agencies on the capital needs of the district … and prepare and submit … capital budget priorities;
  
• Consult with agencies on the program needs of the community district to be funded from the expense budget … and prepare and submit … expense budget priorities;
  
• Exercise the initial review of applications and proposals of public agencies and private entities for the use, development or improvement of land located in the community district;
  
• Assist agencies in the preparation of service statements of agency objectives, priorities, programs and projected activities within the community district and review such statements; and,
  
• Evaluate the quality and quantity of services provided by agencies within the community district.
  

Clearly accurate data is a useful tool for these groups and 311 is perhaps the largest and most up to date source of data available to them.

It appears that there are some concerns regarding the confidentiality of the reporting process as well as the additional costs and effort that the requested reporting would entail. The Committee on Technology in Government is currently reviewing the status of the bill and the concerns expressed on these issues and is hoping to pass something soon.

For background see The June 2004 meeting notes and the September 2004 meeting update.

I am the co-chair of the Pollution Prevention Citizen's Advisory Committee for the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). Our focus to reduce the pollutants entering the NYC sewer system. Our goals are cleaner waterways and a better biosolid product available for use in parks, along roadways and in some agricutural applications.

The group is currently reviewing the various ways that citizen's interact with the DEP. Our January 26th meeting included a presentation on the 311 system and DEP related complaints. As preparation for the meeting, I requested aggregate information and was supplied with a list of totals of DEP 311 requests/complaints for the month of September 2004 and a year to date total at that point.

After the meeting I requested further reports, to see how the DEP internally aggregates and reviews this data, but was not able to obtain the additional information. I therefore took the report I had already been given, categorized the data myself and presented it to our group at our March 16th meeting. The goal was twofold; to gain a better sense of how the complaints might fit into broader categories, and to point out a gap in the current 311 approach - the lack of publicly available meaningful reports (see links on side for publicly available reports).

Here is a list of the top 150 types of DEP 311 interactions, sorted in a descending order from the most to least frequent requests. MG type is simply my own (not DEP's) categorization. If DEP had supplied a report, we would use their categories. Subtype is a list of all requests the DEP has targeted as being of priority (the word priority is listed in the complaint name).

This second list is a grouping of all DEP priority complaints taken from the detailed listing - and grouped by MG type.

The third listing is a summary of all DEP 311 requests grouped by MG category.

I sent this to the Mayor Sunday March 6. One week later, no response. I wasn't exactly expecting a personal reply but....
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Dear Mayor Bloomberg,
Thanks for giving me your e-mail at the Crain’s breakfast so I could follow-up on the issue of 311 information on the web.

311 is a tremendous achievement. However, at this time, the information available on the web is very limited. Significant amounts of aggregate data can be made available to better inform citizens about the activity performed by agencies and potentially to enable the development of new commercial applications to meet local needs as revealed by this data.

Currently 311 reporting info exists on two places on the City’s web site:

1) The performance reporting area – which gives monthly volume and performance levels and the top five services requested. This is very high level and limited data.

2) My Neighborhood Statistics – This information is displayed by community district or police precinct. Most info on this page is not 311 related but yearly reported data (actually only seven specific stats are 311 related). All the data is interesting but the page appears primarily designed from the perspective of a city planner and flawed as a citizen user interface. For example, 311 totals are given per 10,000 residents (not a way the average citizen thinks of his/her neighborhood) – as opposed to total numbers.

What would be the ideal?
Short term - Aggregate data by agency/by month. For example, from the DEP there should be a page with total calls in, broken down by type of complaint (there are about 150 types for DEP) and further aggregated by a broader classification (all noise complaints, all priority complaints, etc. – however the DEP groups the data). Ideally there would be a section of the City website with this aggregate data displayed by agency. Each agency internally monitors this data but the information is not available to citizens.

Longer term – Create a user friendly stats area designed with the citizen in mind from the start. Give the viewer the ability to mix 311 stats from different agencies into a report so they could track issues they were interested in as opposed to track by the organizational structure of city government. Along the same lines, make it possible for a citizen to draw a virtual map of an area that he/she would like stats about and enable reporting based on that area. This would allow you to create boundaries along lines you considered “your neighborhood” and track how it was doing. This is more meaningful to a citizen than a community district or police precinct boundary, which often merges various neighborhoods into one unit while sometimes splitting others. The city has the capability of grouping data down to tax block or census block levels, so this is very doable.

Mr. Mayor, if you made it this far, I’m very appreciative. Let me know how I can help with this and who to speak with. Thanks again for the tremendous job you’ve been doing, New York is in far better shapebecause of your efforts.

Sincerely,
Michael Greene

311 Advocate's focus is on influencing the evolution of New York City's e-government initiatives by incorporating greater citizen participation and feedback.

Wikipedia, the Internet's Open Source Encyclopedia defines e-government as "the use by the general government (including the public sector) of electronic technologies (such as Internet, intranet, extranet, databases, decision support systems, surveillance systems and wireless computing) that have the ability to transform relations within the general government bodies and between the general government, its citizens and businesses to better deliver services and improve its efficiency."*

New York City's implementation of 311 is by far the boldest e-government initiative this city has ever seen. It has dramatically shifted the way citizens can register complaints, questions and problems.

The key question as to how significant this new form of e-government will be is whether or not it can move beyond a good front-end. How can the city use 311 to improve interactions beyond the initial citizen request? Also, will NYC create a reporting structure that encourages citizen review and involvement?

This site is dedicated to advocating for greater citizen involvement in the evolution of this new application. We want the citizens/clients/customers to help design and improve 311 and other of e-government initiatives.


*(Note, since it was Wikipedia, I took the liberty of editing the definition a bit to shorten the sentence. Check out the link on the side for the full original).

Government bureaucracy, whether at the city, state or federal level is not known for providing--or even caring about--an optimal customer experience for its citizens. Given New York's undeniable history of political bottlenecks and confusion, city dwellers have learned to complain loudly but expect little in the day-to-day dealings with the municipality.

Yet here we are, witnessing NYC integrate the concepts of customer service and modern communication technology to create one of the most useful and--yes--user friendly services to roll out in years: 311. With an election approaching and a Mayor looking for themes that connect with the voters, we’re bound to be hearing a lot more about this new form of e-government during the coming months.

311 is classic Bloomberg, applying new technology to streamline the input and display of data. Like the financial and business applications he's built, the focus is on providing convenient access to timely information, thus meeting the needs of the customer/citizen. Instead of forcing us to navigate a maze of overlapping agencies and functions, each with its own contact number and procedures, now we just need to dial one number: no muss, no fuss, no Tammany Hall drudgery.

For those inured to painfully complex automated phone systems designed to steer callers away from the remote possibility of talking to a real human being, 311 is startling in its emphasis of the human touch. The call centers are staffed by well trained, highly courteous operators familiar with a range of services and equipped with a database of information to help them answer questions, fill in forms or hook callers into the correct agency. Finally, when they’ve completed the “transaction” operators are sure to ask “is there anything else I can help you with today?” It’s enough to leave even the most cynical New Yorker somewhat dazed and apt to blurt out an embarrassing, “no, but thank you very much.”

After enjoying the 311 experience, you might wistfully believe this one-stop-shopping can meet all of your city service needs. But don't get too carried away, for all too often 311 is simply an initial point of entry. Once you’ve left the system, confusing regulations, inflexible employees and inaccessible supervisors remain. And, as always, if the problem spans more than one agency, you’re condemned to wander through a vast, dark land of Byzantine rules and personal fiefdoms. The city government is still, well, the city government.

But let’s keep our perspective. The technology is less than a decade old and while most cities are just beginning to use 311 to route non-emergency calls away from 911, New York is positioning it as a major new channel of citizen and government communication. The service is available 24 hours a day, 365 days a year and capable of providing assistance in 170 languages. For the first time, we have easy access to an intelligent and helpful agent of government, totally dedicated to helping us get information, input requests, or connect to the appropriate source. Furthermore, city commissioners now have timely feedback as to what the people are asking for and how well their staff is delivering it. The Mayor is regularly updated and holds the commissioners responsible for their agency's 311 performance.

It would be helpful if the public also had access to this aggregate data but we see only a paltry selection of 311 system-wide statistics in the "Performance Reporting" section of the City's web site. Citizens can find locally relevant information on the "My Neighborhood Statistics," page where the input of an address returns a community district or police precinct map and its accompanying 311, health, education, and crime related data. It's a nifty on-line feature, which could be vastly improved if the web designers would actually speak to interested citizens about the information and format they'd find most useful. Improved on-line functionality would not only enable greater public participation but might open business opportunities for enterprising individuals looking to create innovative services in response to newly uncovered local needs.

Acknowledging that there's plenty of room for growth, 311's initial implementation has been impressive and the core principles are sound: customer service, information access and government accountability. These are powerful campaign themes for a chief executive running for reelection in a city that rides on sky bound vision but gets dragged down by the underperformance of its public sector and the decay of its physical plant. And besides, you can now get a pothole fixed, sewer cleaned or hear today's parking regulations all through one number. What more could a New Yorker ask for?