The Open311 Dashboard

"Fifteen months ago, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced the Open311 API that allows citizens to monitor and report problems to their city government through a unified web service. Two cities have implemented the API so far (San Francisco and Boston) with more planning to roll out next year. With all that data so easily accessible, 2011 fellow Michael Evans took on a project to make creative visualizations with it. Thus, the Open311 dashboard was born.

"With the Open311 Dashboard, we aim to take the deluge of data that 311 provides and translate it into a clean and interactive dashboard that will help set citizens’ expectations of service request response times, identify 311 trends in a city and across the country, and provide city administrators data about the efficiency of various city services."

Chris’s CfA Summer: Preview the Open311 Dashboard | Code for America

Rebooting Public Notices

"Rebooting Public Notices: Public notices and inquiries should be moved from the newspapers and the bowels of the web online to where we are: networks like Facebook and Twitter."

http://infovegan.com/2011/05/10/rebooting-public-notices

The spirt of this posting is good. Putting notices in a location where people will see them is important. The location need no longer be the single "newspaper of record". Facebook and twitter are two such locations.

You need to be careful when discussing this issue to clearly distinguish between notice and comment. While a notice can be in multiple locations comments must not. All comments have to be gathered by a central service. The service must allow commenting my many mechanisms -- online and offline. The service must have a means of attributing comments to constituents -- esp. at the local level. Anonymous comments are not allowed. Anonymity within the commenting system must be limited to voting on notices and on comments. But even here, while the vote is anonymously tallied the casting of a vote requires attribution.

Build a Transparency Search Engine - Sunlight Foundation

Google Custom Search is a simple service that lets you create your own search engine based on links that you choose. This is incredibly useful if you regularly need to search through a defined list of sites and want to exclude outside sources. Within a municipality you could quickly create a search that includes the municipal web site and its supporting web sites like ordinances, zoning, state regulation, property appraisal, etc. It is also a great way to make a specialized repository available by only presenting a basic browsing interface and let Google do the rest.

For an example see http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/03/03/transparency-tools-transparency-search-engine/