Phind It for Me: Voxeo developer Mark Headd launches city service location tool [VIDEO]

Mark Headd shows off an early version of Phind It For Me during the BarCamp NewsInnovation Open Gov Hackathon April 30, 2011.

The developer behind a new text messaging service aimed at reducing 311 call volume was a Division II All American gymnast in 1990. That gives him his balance.

Phind it for Me is a new service based on an open source project [GitHub] that launched public beta in Philadelphia this week from Mark Headd, a ‘developer evangelist’ for the Voxeo Labs development arm of a national VoIP carrier.

Users send a simple text message from any SMS-enabled mobile phone with an address and a hashtag to find the closest location of a specific type of service, like a library, a school or a fire station, with plans for polling places and farmers markets in the coming days and more services in the future.

Phind It is based on Headd’s work during a Code for America DataCamp on the PHLAPI, which makes service locations more actionable.

“More people are getting smart phones, but they still aren’t nearly as available as cell phones with a basic text messaging service, which you can find around the world,” Headd, 42, said during the BarCamp NewsInnovation Open Gov Hackathon he helped organize. “This service could really give new people access to valuable information.”

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Philly 311 web app to be piloted in June, due for public release ‘in next three months’

Screenshots of the 311 app on BlackBerry, featuring the welcome and problem screens. Click to enlarge.

By the summer’s end, Philadelphia 311 will take another big step forward, City Managing Director Rich Negrin announced at the Philly Tech Week Signature Event.

“In the next three months, we’ll see the release of our first 311 [web] app” Negrin told 150 attendees at WHYY, many tweeting the news to a projected Twitterfall, in highlighting what’s new for the non-emergency call center.

The web application represents another, more passive front face to 311, supporting call intake volume — due to surpass three million calls received, Negrin added — and the walk-up service at City Hall.

“It’s not just your granddaddy’s app,” said Rosetta Lue, the director of the non-emergency call center. “You can enter requests, track complaints and have a community calendar with what’s happening. You don’t have to wait for our call center to be open.”

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DATA CRUNCHED: All that’s needed to jump start an open data movement is a city government that doesn’t stand in the way

If you were going to judge the City of Philadelphia’s involvement in the buzzy good government movement of the past five years, you’d need some way to evaluate how much of its agency data is shared. Until the launch of OpenDataPhilly.org this afternoon, it’s not entirely clear where you would have started.

The web and its users, some progressive governments and their constituents have all conspired together in the past half decade to set a precedent troubling for others: the data and information, numbers and calculations, charts and graphs that government institutions have collected for a century or two should be made available for public consumption.

The city governments of Washington D.C., San Francisco and London are leading the way, creating agency workflow that incorporates the Internet and uses it to share its practices and data collection as a norm.

This year, New York City followed its BigApps contest — built to spur third-party development around city data — by unveiling a real-time 311 request map and plans to put QR codes on building permits by 2013. Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake signed an executive order compelling agencies to post its data online, and Raleigh, N.C. has made a case for open source technology.

More broadly, the Canadian federal government has launched a data catalog of its own, following Data.gov, championed by the Obama administration.

Now, with the April 25 unveiling of OpenDataPhilly.org, the City of Philadelphia has made a great, albeit perhaps belated, step forward. The puzzling part seems to be how little the city actually had to do with it.

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Three steps for the City of Philadelphia to have clear path for releasing data, says interim CTO Tommy Jones

Tommy Jones, the City of Philadelphia interim CTO,  is good with details.

When Technically Philly asks about releasing data, instead of big vision, the former Washington D.C. deputy CTO gets right to the point.

“In D.C., we put up 425 data sets from crime to procurement to health to insurance and any other topic. I don’t lay claim to starting it, but I do lay claim to growing it a lot,” Jones says. “But here, in Philly, well, we’re in the infancy.”

While the technology community’s interest is high and a private partnership to catalog what city data is already available is underway, Jones is reliably focused on the details to make that happen.

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Jim Kenney, City Councilman, on Philly 311 today, tomorrow and what is holding it back

Councilman Jim Kenney wants another memo sent out.

Just about from the start, for almost two and a half years, Kenney says he’s been requesting a monitor that would let him listen into randomized Philly 311 calls.

“I don’t want to get someone in trouble,” he says. “It’s an issue of identifying a problem., finding something that doesn’t sound right.”

With that, he calls off to a legislative aide about again requesting off 311 administration that he gets the device, which he says is common place in large companies with customer service representatives, like at Independence Blue Cross, where he first heard of it.

And that’s just it, though the councilman at large is largely credited for introducing the concept of 311 to Mayor Nutter who Kenney credits with actually enacting, Kenney has no real direct oversight or responsibility for the city services hotline. He just wants to listen in.

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New York City Unveils Real-Time 311 Request Map

From Government Technology:

New York City has launched a new map to track citizens’ complaints and requests in real time as they’re entered through the city’s 311 service request program.

The New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications says that in addition to promoting transparency, the map has the potential to be an important tool for intelligence gathering.

“Up until yesterday we looked at 311 as a method that disgruntled citizens would use to call us; we didn’t look at it as an opportunity for solutions,” New York City’s Deputy Mayor of Operations Stephen Goldsmith said Wednesday,Feb. 16.

via New York City Unveils Real-Time 311 Request Map.

City CTO explains why 311 iPhone app is two months late

Last week, we wrote that Philadelphia’s planned 311 iPhone app — which would allow folks to submit complaints and ask questions to the city’s citizen-serving 311 agency — was two months late.

In a conversation last week, city Chief Technology Officer Allan Frank responded to some of the specifics of the article, which posited alternatives to in-house development of the application and challenged the city to take advantage of free app technologies and to turn to Philadelphia’s talented and civic-focused developers for help.

Frank said that contrary to statements in the article, the application hasn’t cost taxpayers anything — it’s been a labor of love for several employees in the department — and that the city did research low-cost and free, third-party options but found that its solution was the strongest.

So, then, why is it two months late?

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Philly Post: Philly 311 – There’s no app for that

Last week, while the City of Philadelphia was busy celebrating the country’s 234th birthday, another anniversary passed by with little fanfare. July 5 marked three months since the city announced it was developing its own 311 iPhone application to allow citizens to access city data on the go. It also marked the day the application was two months late.

In an April 5 announcement, Division of Technology chief Allan Frank said the application would be available in May, yet there’s still no sign of it on the city’s 311 site or in the App Store.

While we’re certainly on board with city government embracing new technologies, there were several alternatives to the city developing the application itself that would have sped up its development and saved precious taxpayer dollars.

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

Five city departments and agencies that could use a Web overhaul

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Read this post on Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

The use of technology to transform government has been growing municipal concern in city halls across the country.

Here, the City of Philadelphia has announced its intentions to release a service orientated 311 iPhone application, is applying for ultra highspeed broadband from Google and is in hot pursuit of a funded team of developers and technologists to make our every government transparency dream come true.

The overtures are there, even if the substance hasn’t yet hit the pavement.

As such, a question or three remains as to where the priorities of the newly centralized city division of technology should be. The Web has no limits — of space or time. So we’d think every department’s site should be an open and transparent list of expenditures and salaries, but there are specific goals each agency could reach — and those we wish they could.

Below, we share our hopes for Web openness and effectiveness at five agencies or departments Philadelphians often loathe.

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If we could design Philadelphia’s 311 iPhone App

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Yesterday it was revealed that the City of Philadelphia is developing an iPhone application for its 311 non-emergency call system that will allow users to submit requests for city services using an Apple smartphone.

As city Chief Technology Officer Allan Frank told the Inquirer, users will be able to track and retrieve the same information they can from the city’s 311 telephone service. The mobile interface, though, will allow for more, like snapping a photograph of a pothole to request that it be filled. Frank hopes the application will launch next month as a bare-bones preview of what’s to come, before the “rocket-science stuff.”

Though Frank is vague about the future of the software, we’ve got some initial suggestions for what could be easily (and not-so-easily) implemented and advice for the city programmers tasked with developing it.

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.