If you were the mayor of the District of Columbia, how would you provide customer service? One major goal of the Gray Administration is to help the District government reach a gold standard of customer service delivery, exemplified by three key components:
- Prompt and thorough response to constituent calls, written correspondence and requests for service
- Professional and courteous treatment of constituents
- Reliable entry points to government services
The top ten online services you can request are: Broken Meters, Residential Bulk Collection, Parking Enforcement, Tree Services, Illegal Dumping, Street and Alley Light Repair, Alley Cleaning, Residential Trash and Recycling, Street Sweeping, and Illegal Posters>
The featured services come with performance measures:
- Sidewalk Repair: DDOT resolves sidewalk repair requests within 25 business days.
- Broken Parking Meters: Single-space meters are fixed within 72 hours, multi-space within 24.
- Streetlight Repairs: Expected date of completion depends upon the nature of the problem.
- Submit a New Service Request
- Check Service Request Status
- Check Your Request History
- View 311 Service Requests Map
- Resolution Time Table
If one can download the actual data and use it for their own analysis, that is considered a best practice now-days so crowd-sourcing can occur. Crowd-sourcing means anyone can take anyone’s data and do anything they want with it. This is the basis for innovation and new jobs with open government data. >
For years the District of Columbia Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) has provided public access to city operational data on the Internet. Now the District of Columbia OCTO’s Data Catalog provides citizens with the access to 995 datasets from multiple agencies as a catalyst to encourage agencies to operate as in a more responsive, better performing way.
These data sets can be downloaded in XML, Text/CSV, KML or ESRI Shapefile formats to create visualizations. Some data sets are already visualized on Google Maps as shown above for 311 Service Requests. One can also use the data catalog to subscribe to 12 live data feeds.>
To use the DC Data Catalog, I had to first make it more searchable by converting its XML file to a spreadsheet and importing it into a visualization tool to create a dashboard. I also had to select an interesting data set and boundary files to display it on in order to create an analytic capability beyond the example above. I selected the historic 311 Services data set (shown live above) because it had good Metadata and was a relatively big data set with 429,676 rows by 37 columns.
The analytic dashboard is shown live elsewhere. One can see the definitions and examples of each of the 62 data columns in the 311 Services data set.
One can also filter the data set by Service Status (Closed, Open, OverDue Closed, and OverDue Open) to see the numbers in the Bar Chart and the spatial distribution in the Scatter Plot.
The DC Data Catalog can be filtered by 11 Categories: Government Operations, Other, Environment, Infrastructure, HealthCare, Demographics, Economic Development, Education, Historical Outlook, Human Services, and Public Safety.
Based on my drill-downs into various files, the Gray Administration is providing an excellent online 311 service to its citizens based on historical data analysis. And its DC Data Catalog is a best practice of crowd-sourcing based on the fact that I was able to work with it to produce my own dashboard of services.