As crazy as it sounds, it’s actually possible. One of the most popular uses of Blockboard is our “Cityfix” category, which lets neighbors use their iPhone to report issues that require the city’s attention. This includes everything from graffiti and litter to potholes and sewer problems. Blockboard users can report these issues in under a minute: you just snap a photo, indicate your location on a map and choose a category.

Blockboard packages up that information and automatically sends it to San Francisco’s 311 Customer Service Center (using their implementation of the Open311 standard). This puts the issue into the city’s tracking system, and that means a human being is likely to do something about it.

To get a clearer sense of how well the city’s process is actually working, we did an analysis of issues reported during our recent beta test in the Mission District.

Our findings paint an encouraging picture. Even in this era of limited budgets and manpower, the city manages to address most citizen-reported issues in a timely manner. There is just one notable hole, and the story behind it is an interesting one. But overall we think the city deserves credit for delivering on its commitments.

Resolution rates

Out of a sample of 100 city issues reported in the Mission over a two-month period using the Blockboard app, we found that 65 were resolved by the city, within an average of 3.6 days. As of this writing, 35 issues remained unresolved. On the surface a 65% resolution rate doesn’t sound great, but let’s dig a little deeper.

The following chart breaks down reported issues by category. While these categories do not precisely match those used by the city, we use them in Blockboard because we believe they are easier for citizens to understand and navigate.

As you can see, issues related to litter and trash are by far the most common, and the city resolves the vast majority of them (over 96%).

On the opposite end of the spectrum lies graffiti and vandalism. While these constitute the second most common set of issues reported by Blockboard users, they have a very poor resolution rate — just 12%. (Street issues — such as potholes — turn in a similarly poor showing, but there are far fewer of them in comparison.)

Time to resolution

The picture is also interesting when sliced by time. Here is the average time-to-resolution for each category:

Most categories of issues are resolved within 1-3 days — a fairly impressive track record in our opinion. But here again we find that graffiti and vandalism really stands out. With an average time-to-resolution of over 23 days, even the few issues that are lucky enough to be resolved take a while to get there.

So why is graffiti so problematic for the city?

A little research reveals that while the city can take immediate action by painting over graffiti on public or city property (for example, parking meters or city buildings) things get complicated when it comes to graffiti on private property. In such cases, the city’s graffiti abatement law (Article 23 of the San Francisco Public Works Code) determines what happens next.

Enacted in 2004 as part of a renewed campaign to discourage graffiti across the city, the law says that it is the owner’s responsibility to clean up graffiti on their property. Once the city has been notified, it sends out an inspector to confirm the report. The city then notifies the owner, who then has 30 days to “abate” the graffiti (i.e. paint over it). If the owner does not comply, additional warnings and then fines may apply. If the owner prefers, they can grant the city permission to take care of the problem on their behalf, but without this permission the city can’t take action until much later on.

This entire process can take a great deal of time and appears to be the cause of the low (and slow) resolution rates we’ve observed. We plan to track these issues over a longer time period in order to better understand the true rate of resolution.

If we set aside graffiti-related issues, the city’s resolution rate is 83%. Our analysis shows that the city is generally responsive to citizen complaints, within the scope of its legal abilities.

Hotspots

Finally, we’ll leave you with one more juicy piece of data. Below is a heatmap (created with OpenHeatMap) showing geographic clustering of issues reported in the Mission. You’ll notice some “hotspots” along Valencia between roughly 18th and 21st, as well as 22nd and Shotwell, and the area around 16th and Mission. It would be interesting to correlate this with other sources such as crime or demographics. If you’re reading this and have ideas, please free free to reach out!

GAFFTA Chairman Peter Hirshberg and Mayoral Candidate and San Francisco Board of Supervisors President David Chiu chat with the Goodbuildings.net team. The team, including MIT SENSEable Cities Lab research associate Christine Outram, created an app that will allow tenants to compare commercial spaces on energy efficiency, water efficiency, waste disposal, the walkability, bikability or proximity to public transit and occupant ratings using data from LEEDS certification, Energy Star, walkscore.com and Public Open Spaces

Building data. It’s a small thing, but what if the buildings where we live, work and play were able to show us how they work? How much energy they use, what their carbon footprint is, how they compare to the building next door? Building data. It’s also a huge thing, a salvo in the data revolution that rages across the U.S. and brings the hope of transparent, agile and accountable government.

San Francisco has always been a proving ground for small ideas that blow up to impact the American landscape in ways no one could have predicted, from the hippies in the 1960s to the tech boom that is still ongoing. The current movement is challenging coders, data artists, designers and makers to find, create and illuminate available data to build apps, widgets and games to make the city better — to use civic hackathons to create experiments that have the potential to change the face of city government.

This puzzle is the basis of the Gray Area Foundation For the Arts (GAFFTA)’s Summer of Smart program, a three-month experiment in urban innovation that is bringing together developers, designers, city officials, urbanists, journalists, community members, and more to see what happens when you give ordinary citizens the tools to create change. GAFFTA, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that funds and creates experiments that build social consciousness through digital culture, along with the San Francisco Department of Technology, has created a living laboratory for a new model for how citizens and government can work directly together to address urban issues. It’s called Democracy 3.0, and it’s not limited to the West Coast anymore.

GAFFTA’s second urban hackathon was held over the weekend of July 22 to 24, and focused on sustainability, transportation, and energy.

One eye-opener for the 100 passionate citizen who showed up on Friday night was that the transportation sector is awash in data, (though it’s often not being used correctly or at all by the actual transportation agencies) while building data is such a morass of different formats and metrics that it’s impossible to work with.

“The reason we are talking about transportation and buildings is that the two of them account for a huge percentage of our country’s energy bill,” said Peter Hirshberg, chairman of GAFFTA. “In a city, buildings consume 40 percent of our energy bill, and about 30 percent of that could be saved if we knew what was going on. The problem is that we’re a little bit data blind. There’s just not that much information about buildings.”

In order to focus energy and attention on that problem, GAFFTA brought in experts to talk to the hackers about transportation, energy efficiency and city government.

Di-Ann Eisnor, a GAFFTA board member and executive at WAZE told the group about the how crowd-sourced traffic data is providing far more real time information about what’s happening on our roads than was ever available from government, sensors, or helicopter traffic services. “When you turn gathering traffic data into a game, and thousands of smart phone users play along, you are able to see what’s going on and manage traffic as never before,” Eisnor said. In keeping with the art spirit of things, she showed GAFFTA created visualizations of LA traffic data from the recent Carmageddon weekend.

Brandon Tinianov, CTO of Serious Energy spoke of buildings as machines full of data and manageable, but too often lacking the software layer and systems to allow building managers to do anything about it. His firm is a leader in providing industrial solutions to the problems, but he too called for a building data movement — to create awareness, open up more data, and to help cities understand how much better and more efficient buildings could be when attention was focused on working with the right data. “We can map bikes, trash, cars, but we can’t map buildings,” he said. “No one in this room knows what this building consumes or if it’s efficient.”

By Sunday evening, the seven teams had created projects that, in some ways, used available data to highlight what was missing. One team used available data to create a widget that will allow tenants of commercial buildings to compare sustainability factors such as energy use, waste generated and water consumed. Another group used data supplied by Muni to build an app that would allow line supervisors to use the same information that riders have to make on-the-fly decisions about trains and buses. Another takes information from building permits available on data.gov to create a picture of green building retrofit history in San Francisco. All in all, the teams were about evenly split between transportation and buildings, somewhat surprising given the difference in the amount of data that was out there between the two.

“This weekend was particularly interesting, because after searching for data, it became very clear that the transportation sector is way ahead of the energy sector, and part of this is demonstrating useful applications for the energy data: something I believe the weekend achieved,” said Christine Outram, research associate at the MIT SENSEable City lab. Outram and her team created Goodbuildings.net, a site that will allow tenants to compare commercial spaces on energy efficiency, water efficiency, waste disposal, the walkability, bikability or proximity to public transit and occupant ratings using data from LEEDS certification, Energy Star, walkscore.com and Public Open Spaces. “The story of data needs to be told, because data provides value and insight. We have seen this happen in the transportation sector, where mobile applications and data analysis have resulted in a more convenient, efficient, and flexible transit system that doesn’t require the roll-out of additional infrastructure or vehicles. This is not enough though, we must continue to tell the story of data so that other sectors begin to understand the value proposition.”

Building data, on the other hand, is a confusing mess of formats, standards and metrics. In February, San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee signed the Existing Commercial Building Energy Performance Ordinance, which requires owners of commercial buildings to determine how much energy a building uses and make that data available, but it doesn’t apply universally until 2013. Even the data that is currently available isn’t always in the same formats, a problem tackled by the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) and the Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in their PAP10 project to create a data standard for energy usage.

“Government data is critical for the public in terms of transparency and accountability,” said Jay Nath, director of innovation at the San Francisco department of technology. While the projects that came from the weekend were all very good, Nath thinks they could have been even better if the data was there. “Data is the raw material for much of the work that happens at hackathons. Our goal as government is to increase access to data that is consistent with our privacy and security policies. Events like this can spur demand for data that can raise awareness within government.”

The other focus of the weekend, transportation, had almost the complete opposite problem: the groups were swimming in data, but the public transit agencies in the city don’t have access to it, or don’t actually use it. Emily Drennen, a current intern with Muni, decided to use the weekend to fix Muni: “You know, a small, manageable project.” Her idea was originally to find a way to allow train operators and line supervisors to access the same information that riders have, on nextmuni.com, and use that data to make on-the-fly decisions to solve bunched up buses or clogged muni trains. But when they went down and actually talked to some of the Muni employees, it turned out that supervisors often didn’t even know when there was a problem, much less have the ability to solve it on the fly. “The people who are in charge are basically on their radios going ‘Roger roger’ and trying to get the information across,” said Matt Kroneberger, a Berkeley graduate student.

The Summer of Smart hackathons have drawn the attention of people across the city, from mayoral candidates to tech superstars and San Francisco-based corporations. Candidates Phil Ting, Joanna Rees and David Chiu stopped by the GAFFTA headquarters and all said that they want the innovative spirit of the hackathons to live on in their administrations, which is exactly what Hirshberg hoped would happen when he came up with the idea.

“The insight for summer of smart, for me, began when GAFFTA Executive Director Josette Melchor and I were talking to supervisors and mayoral candidates about open data and visualization and they looked at us and said, ‘well we’ve heard about that, but how does gov 2.0 help make a better city, make people be more healthy, solve social problems or make the trains run on time? What does it do for our voters?’,” Hirshberg said. “I realized that it was a classic case of us geeks being excited about something and the business users not having any idea what we’re talking about. This is a classic problem in technology marketing So I was really interested in making the people who are running for office clients for real live projects. If they said ‘these are the priorities,’ that would turn the geeks into people who actually understood what the real business use was. By making it a part of the campaign process, we’d create a lot of awareness. We’d be a laboratory for ideas that candidates might want to adopt – ideas worth stealing.” Candidate Phil Ting echoed this when he said, “When you are in a campaign, you are constantly looking to push the envelope and challenge yourself as well as the city and you’re looking for innovative ideas. In a campaign, it’s like policy entrepreneurship. Candidates, especially those of us who are running for offices we haven’t held, we’re looking to identify issues that we can champion and that we can work on and I think that’s happening a lot in this campaign.”

While that sounds idyllic, you might be forgiven if your experiences with city government have made you a bit cynical. However, in this case it’s actually working. Remember that Muni app, created in a weekend by seven regular citizens? On Sunday evening, the groups presented their apps to an audience including Melanie Nutter, Director of the San Francisco Department of Environment. When the conversation turned to the potential to offend a city IT staffer, Hirshberg turned to Nutter and asked, “You work for the city, are we in trouble yet?” Nutter’s response? “I’m part of the [Muni] strategic planning team and I think this is a great thing.”

San Francisco mayoral candidates at SFOpen 2011, June 16. (photo by GovFresh)

In August of 1993, San Francisco officially adopted the Sunshine Ordinance, a law that allowed any citizen to request city documents, records, filings or correspondence, attend meetings of any group that meets with the Mayor or city department heads and make any meeting of the governing bodies of certain local, state, regional and federal agencies attended by City representatives public.

We were pioneers in transparency and one of the first cities in the entire country to give our citizens this type of access to our government.

At the time, it was a revolutionary ordinance that would change the way San Franciscans engage with their representatives and inspire similar laws throughout the country.

Fast forward to 2011 where the internet has changed everything about the way we interact with our government and lead our lives.

The brick wall that used to stand between decision makers and the people they serve is eroding and there is an unprecedented level of access to our lawmakers, power brokers and elected officials.

If my parents wanted to hear from their congresswoman or supervisor when they were my age, they would have to write a letter and might wait weeks or even months for a response. In today’s world, we can post a question to an elected official on their Facebook page and hear back the same day. But in the age of Wikileaks, social media, blogging and hackathons, has our local government really caught up?

During my time as an intern in the New Media Office at the Obama White House, I oversaw weekly Facebook live chats between Senior Administration officials and the White House’s over 100,000 Facebook fans. My job was to read the questions coming in through the Facebook feed and send them on to the moderator. There was nothing more thrilling than seeing someone from their home in Ohio or Montana or California ask Ben Rhodes to explain his national security policy in Washington DC and get an answer in real time. That’s open government.

Yet despite the fact that we live in a city that is home to Twitter, Yelp, Zynga and many other leading tech companies our local government hasn’t quite caught up with the private sector we serve. Especially when it comes to using the technology available to us to keep our citizens aware and engaged and allowing them access to the inner workings of our city. That is essential if we want them to feel that they have a stake in the type of government we hope to create.

When President Obama first came into office in 2009, his administration made a commitment to transparency, participation and collaboration with with a pledge to strengthen an open government

Inspired by this effort, Luke Fretwell and Brian Purchia at GovFresh drafted a similar pledge that has already been signed by eight mayoral candidates: Joanna Rees, Phil Ting, Dennis Herrera, Leland Yee, David Chiu, Bevan Dufty, Michela Alioto-Pier, and John Avalos. Though spearheaded by a Gov 2.0 effort, the pledge recognizes that open government isn’t just about technology, as written:

“Open government is the movement to improve government by making government more transparent, participatory, collaborative, accountable, efficient, and effective. Open government will help build the public’s trust and satisfaction in government, will improve government’s delivery of services, and will create new opportunities for innovation.”

The reality is that one of the best possible ways to make government more collaborative, effective, and efficient, is to use the internet and the technologies available to our great city to create the opportunities for innovation that the pledge alludes to.

We’ve fallen behind on this effort and if we want San Francisco to be a leader in technology, it’s about time that we speed back up. The next Mayor of San Francisco will be responsible for making this a reality, so they better understand what open government means and have a plan for how we can enact it.

It’s 9:15 on Friday night, and there are about 100 people milling around the GAAFTA headquarters. Wandering around, you hear one group talking about using current and historical MUNI data to, in the words of GAFFTA’s co-founder and Chairman Peter Hirshberg, “make the bus chase you, rather than you chase the bus.”

Another group is creating an app that works with the Mayor’s office of Housing and Redevelopment to show available apartments and co-working spaces in realtime. A third group wants to crowdsource available sustainability data to compare buildings in the city.

GAFFTA’s second Summer of Smart hackathon is off and running, and it’s bringing together architects, building engineers, journalists, Android developers – pretty much anyone you can imagine who might be interested in making their city a better, more responsive and more innovative place to live.

The first SoS, held the weekend of June 24th, focused on community development and public art. Of the seven projects that hackers put together over the roughly 24-hour hackathon, about half are still being worked on a month later, a much higher percentage than most hackathons have, says GAFFTA research director Jake Levitas.

What makes SoS different? It’s by design, says Hirshberg. “We picked areas that matter to the city,” he said, “Where you would naturally get geeks and activists who cared so they would stick around and become part of the dialogue. Some hackathons are more commercial, sometimes you’ll have one that’s around social media data and everyone shows up to show off the API from their startup. But this one is pulling people from the community, and so you get this really interesting group of people who really care about this type of data who have more of a diverse background, and are interested in producing results at urban scale.”

The final SoS hackathon, focusing on public health, food and nutrition, will be held the weekend of August 19th. The best projects from the three weekends will be presented to city officials and mayoral candidates at the Commonwealth Club on October 6th.

Photo by Ryan Resella

SFOpen 2011 brought together 9 of the major San Francisco mayoral candidates last week to discuss technology and government, but it also put on display the reason I love the open government community so much.

Friends from all around the Bay Area (and even the East Coast) came together at Automattic to support and watch the first ever mayoral forum on open government, civic technology and public innovation and, despite the political nature of the event, there was much love in the room.

Most of our interaction with government tends to be negative. We get taxed or ticketed. We fight it and complain about how broken it is. We see it as a faceless bureaucracy without realizing good people inside and out are doing something to change this.

Many of those people were in that room last week and were excited to see that a simple civic agenda based on empowering citizens and addressing the basic tenets of open government (transparency, collaboration, participation) will trump politics every time.

SFOpen would’ve never happened without Brian Purchia, Change.org, GAFFTA, Automattic and Code for America, all of whom helped make its execution flawless.

I’d like to especially thank our moderator Mitch Kapor and the candidates themselves for sharing their ideas and showing a willingness to learn about an area that’s new to many:

• Michela Alioto-Pier
• John Avalos
• David Chiu
• Bevan Dufty
• Tony Hall
• Dennis Herrera
• Joanna Rees
• Phil Ting
• Leland Yee

Thanks again to everyone who supported and was excited about SFOpen from the beginning. I’ve said this already, but I especially appreciate Brian Purchia‘s leadership and hope one day he himself runs for mayor.

I’m proud of San Francisco and its open government community, and I’m hopeful this may be the beginning of a new conversation in politics, not just here, but everywhere.

Press

• SFist: SFist Attends: Last Night’s SF Mayoral Open Government Forum
• TechPresident: Tonight, a Mayoral Debate on Open Government in San Francisco
• SFAppeal: Mayoral Candidates Cordial During Debate On Best Ways To Use Tech To Improve SF
• San Francisco Examiner: LIVE COVERAGE: San Francisco mayoral candidate debate
• SF Gate: Mayoral candidates: Internet access for everyone!
• Huffington Post: Open for Government: San Francisco Mayoral Candidates to Debate Tech and Transparency
• SF Gate: Open season
• Politico: OPEN GOVERNMENT MOVEMENT GOES LOCAL
• TechPresident: In San Francisco, Open Government Becomes a Campaign Issue

Gov 2.0 Radio

Post-SFOpen interview I did with Adriel Hampton and Allison Hornery:

Video

Recorded livestream:

Elsewhere

• SFOpen 2011 Flickr pool
• #sfopen hashtag on Twitter

Photo by Ryan Resella

If there’s one lesson that’s inherent to CityCampSF, it’s that crowdsourcing will save the world.

The second CityCamp San Francisco was hosted at the city’s Office of Technology, and featured projects that heavily favored using the community residents to make their block, neighborhood or city better. My takeaway? While the state of California may have proven that direct democracy doesn’t work, the city of San Francisco has shown that giving the power to the people may be the best way to save it.

Here are two examples:

SF Fire App

This is perhaps the best example of how people can help people. The app allows CPR-trained volunteers to get smartphone notifications of cardiac arrest patients who may be near them.

Developers used CityCampSF to work together and create another app to map Automated External Defibrillator (AED) locations. This technology is critical to help save lives, San Francisco City Attorney (and mayoral candidate) Dennis Herrera said, and that information was not readily known before.

Real World Sim City

One of the things I tweeted during the Real World Sim City presentation was “It’s amazing what can be crowdsourced — learning about billboards, gov’t apps, even a Robocop statue in Michigan!” For some reason a spam account picked up on that and commented, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” which unknowingly played right into the ethos of the project. One of the ideas Loveland Technologies Creative Director Jerry Paffendorf talked about was ‘Inchvesting,’ or paying a dollar per inch for vacant lots in downtown Detroit. Sure, you can’t do a lot with an inch, he said, but it gets people involved and invested in their neighborhoods, and good things come from that. You’ve probably heard of another venture Paffendorf had a hand in – the 10-foot bronze statue of Robocop enough people thought was a good idea that they donated $50,000 to make it happen on Kickstarter.

The whole experience was symbolic of the Internet, he said. “Take something that’s really serious, but put some kind of art experience on top. If you want to clean up the park, put a little Robocop on top of it.”

There were so many excellent panels and so little time. There were people coding in the atrium, talking in the hallways and exchanging ideas and business cards in every corner. SF Director of Public Works Ed Reiskin said he applauded events like this, calling them the “next step forward in civic engagement.”

“You ask, ‘how can we empower people,’ how do we take the information the government has and make it work better, make it more useful, more accessible, in ways that we in government didn’t imagine,” Reiskin said. “When you work in an organization you don’t question some of the basic assumptions of why you do what you do. Coming in from the outside, having tech savviness, but also just being citizens, you make sure the government works for you, and that’s tremendously powerful and helpful.”

To learn more about check out #citycampsf on Twitter and the CityCampSF Flickr group.

Videos

CityCampSF founder, NationBuilder Chief Organizer and Gov 2.0 Host Adriel Hampton on CityCampSF:

CityCamp founder Kevin Curry on how CityCamp San Francisco fits in and stands out:

SF Director of Innovation Jay Nath on the value of a city innovation officer:

Tropo’s Mark Headd discusses the impact of hackathons on the open government movement and how developers can get involved:

SF City Attorney and 2011 Mayoral Candidate Dennis Herrera on the role of meetups in civic engagement:

2011 SF Mayoral Candidate Joanna Rees on the role of meetups in civic engagement: