….::: VOX POPULI :::….

Building an Open311 Application

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones, CouchDB, Development Tools, Open Government, Twitter

Earlier this year, I had an idea to build a Twitter application that would allow a citizen to start a 311 service request with their city.

At the time, there was no way to build such an application as no municipality had yet adopted a 311 API that would support it (although the District of Columbia did have a 311 API in place, it did not - at the time - support the type of application I envisioned).

That changed recently, when San Francisco announced the deployment of their Open311 API. I quickly requested an API key and began trying to turn my idea into reality.

My idea resulted in an application that I soft launched last week. TweetMy311 is now live and can be used in the City/County of San Francisco to report 311 service requests. The project website has a detailed description of how it works, but its very close to my original idea.

More good news on the Open311 front came recently when it was announced that San Francisco and the District of Columbia had come to agreement on a shared Open311 standard. This means that apps built to work with the San Francisco 311 API will also work with the 311 API in Washington DC. I’m working on enabling TweetMy311 for Washington DC now, and hope to have this service live there in a few weeks.

Ultimately, I hope people use my application, that they like it, and that it makes it easier to report an issue to their municipality. I did, however, have some other motives in developing this application that I think are equally important.

Are You Experienced?

Since 311 APIs are rare, and (right now) applications that use 311 APIs are also rare, I think there is value in being able to capture the experience of developing an Open311 application from scratch. This information can provide tremendous value to the governments that deploy 311 APIs (what works, what doesn’t, what can be improved, etc.), and for developers thinking about building an Open311 application.

I hope to use TweetMy311 to provide feedback to governments that deploy 311 APIs (and to those thinking about deploying one) so that they can get a sense of how the experience works from a developer that has used one. At the end of the day the ease of use of an API, the quality of documentation, the ability to test applications in a meaningful way and a number of other factors will determine how many developers decide to take the step and become a “civic coder” by building an Open311 application.

Getting to Open

For me, the use of open source technologies in TweetMy311 was important. This project provided a great opportunities to learn more about a technology that I have become fascinated with of late - CouchDB. TweetMy311 is a NoSQL application that uses CouchDB at its core. It runs on Ubuntu Linux with Apache and was built with the PHP scripting language (I guess that makes it the CLAP stack - CouchDB, Linux, Apache, PHP)

Building with open source technologies was important because I hope to be able to share the code I have developed with interested governments that want to learn how an Open311 application is put together. I also believe it’s important because I think the Open311 initiative can be a great mechanism for encouraging the use of open source technologies.

Leading up to this project, I developed a small PHP library for interacting with the San Francisco Open311 API. I make use of this library in TweetMy311 and any other developer that wants to use it in their project is free to do so. I plan on branching this library soon so that it can work with the new version of the Open311 standard.

Give it a twhirl

So if you live in San Francisco and you want to give TweetMy311 a twhirl, check out the description on the project website. I’d appreciate any feedback - positive or negative - because ultimately I think it will make the project better.

I had a great experience developing TweetMy311, and I learned a lot. I’m looking forward to sharing my experience with interested governments and other developers.

What’s Old is New: How Citizens Communicate with Government

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones, News, Open Government

Social media enthusiasts (myself included) let out a big huzzah recently at the results of a study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project entitled Government Online.

The report, like a similar one several years ago, looks at how citizens communicate and interact with their government. This study focused specifically on online contact with government, the use of social media to interact with government and citizen use of open government data.

Open Government Data and Social Media Take Hold

For social media and open government proponents, the findings are exciting:

Efforts by government agencies to post their data online are resonating with citizens. Fully 40% of online adults went online in the preceding year to access data and information about government (for instance, by looking up stimulus spending, political campaign contributions or the text of legislation).

Citizen interactions with government are moving beyond the website. Nearly one third (31%) of online adults use online platforms such as blogs, social networking sites, email, online video or text messaging to get government information.

This is great stuff. It means that efforts to open up government data sets and provide them to citizens in easily consumable formats is starting to pay off. It also means that government takeup of social media tools is providing people with more options, and more opportunities to connect with their government.

Phones Still Reign Supreme

But perhaps the most important piece of information in this report (at least in my mind) is less obvious. Tucked into the introductory section, which many people probably jump right past to get to the findings, is this little nugget of information:

As we found in our last survey of e-government in August 2003, telephone contact is the overall most preferred contact method when people have a problem, question or task involving the government. Currently, 35% of Americans say they prefer using the telephone in these circumstances, a figure that is relatively unchanged from the 38% who said so in 2003.

That’s right. Most people prefer to contact their government using the plain old telephone - more than using a website, or sending an e-mail or even going to a government office in person. The granddaddy of communication technologies still outpaces all others when it comes to citizen interaction with government. And that preference hasn’t changed during the time since the first tweet or since Facebook left the dorm room and went mainstream.

These results are impacted somewhat by the inclusion of both people who are regular online user and those who are not. Looking only at Internet users and those who access the mobile web does show a preference for online communication with government over the telephone, but not by much. And even for those who are regular Internet users with broadband connections and access to the mobile web, the ordinary telephone is still the hotness:

…it is notable that the telephone remains relatively popular even among the technologically proficient, as one-third of home broadband (32%) and wireless internet users (32%) say that the telephone is their favorite means of contact when they need to get in touch with government.

The Takeaway for Open Government and Social Media Advocates

It might be natural for those advocating for the release of more open government data (to build more open government apps) and the use of social media by government to be discouraged by these findings. But I think that citizen preference for using the telephone to contact their government presents some unique opportunities for the Gov 2.0 movement.

As I’ve said many times before, open government data and APIs make a wonderful foundation for cutting edge telephone applications. This was the philosophy behind the application I built last year that uses the Open Leg API from the NY Senate. This application is available through multiple channels, including the plain old telephone - the phone channel for this application is available in both English and Spanish.

The platforms available for building telephone applications are enormously more sophisticated than they were just a few years ago. With tools like Voxeo’s Tropo platform, its relatively easy to build sophisticated applications that serve multiple communications channels from a single code base. It’s never been easier or less expensive to build telephone applications. Ever.

The volumes of open government data and APIs that are now available make the case for building cool telephone applications that much more compelling. More open government data = more cool applications.

Additionally, as the worlds of telephony and social media converge, opportunities for what I call “cascading modality” will continue to present themselves. Take the case of Internet users discussed above who are comfortable with the mobile web. Even those people may still find the telephone a convenient way to connect with their government. These people are prime candidates for cascading modality.

Imagine a citizen out for a leisurely stroll with their dog in their neighborhood when they notice some graffiti on a sidewalk. One day soon that citizen mightwill be able to send out a short tweet to a twitter application like so:

@twitterbot #graffiti 999-555-1212

Their tweet would have their location embedded in it, and would initiate a phone call to 999-555-1212. The Twitter application would connect the citizen with a government call center and use CTI to pass on the type of incident and the location to the operator. The citizen would then talk to the operator and give other relevant details to start a service request.

At the end of the day, one of the primary justifications for open government and Gov 2.0 is to make it more efficient for people to find out about how their government works and easier to interact with government officials.

The importance of the telephone in citizen communication with government must help guide the kinds of data and APIs that governments make available to citizens and developers. Additionally, as governments continue to look at social media as a way to engage and interact with citizens, they must carefully consider how telephone communication fits into this strategy.

The ordinary telephone has been with us for over 130 years. If the findings of the latest Pew Internet report are any indication, it’s not going away any time soon.

The American Cell Phone Gap

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones, Development Tools, Digital Divide

A few years back, I wrote and spoke a lot about the importance of the cell phone, and the potential it has to help deliver public services and provide information from government. A lot has changed in those few years, as documented in an illuminating article published recently in the NY Times.

While the U.S. continues its lust for more powerful, sleeker and functionally dubious devices, the rest of the world continues to leverage the power inherent in the ordinary cell phone. The cell phone is at the heart of digital life in other countries, and huge numbers of people have them (or soon will):

The number of mobile subscriptions in the world is expected to pass five billion this year, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a trade group. That would mean more human beings today have access to a cellphone than the United Nations says have access to a clean toilet.

In the U.S., we continue to look to the build out of the broadband infrastructure as a way to connect those who remain unconnected. I can’t help but think (as I have for some time) that the effort to bring more people into the digital age would be enhanced by leveraging what many already have - an ordinary cell phone. There would be a number of advantages to such an approach - as noted in the NY Times article, cell phones are “cheap and shareable and easily repaired.” They also do not present the same learning curve as other digital devices, like laptops or netbooks.

So why isn’t the cell phone (and services like text messaging) as important in the U.S. as it is in other countries? I think part of the answer is that it hasn’t always been easy or efficient to build text messaging applications.

That’s changing - new services like Tropo and Twilio make it (if you’ll pardon the alliteration) trivial to build SMS apps. Certainly other services will soon follow suit, and more powerful tools for building sophisticated SMS and telephone apps will emerge.

As it continues to get easier to build more sophisticated applications, perhaps our use of these devices will change and become more aligned with the rest of the world.

As someone to whom the power of the ordinary cell phone is readily apparent, I sure hope so.

Open Gov: A Means to and End

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones, Open Government, Standards

With all of the activity and excitement taking place around the country focused on new Government 2.0 and open government initiatives, its easy for those involved to get lost in the technology. Those of us that love technology and work with it for a living can get lost pretty quickly in the minutia of implementing an new solution.

A perfect example of this in my mind is the recently released iPhone App developed by the City of Boston for submitting municipal complaints. When asked why the city chose to develop an iPhone application, a senior advisor to the Mayor said:

“We chose the iPhone mostly because of its sex appeal - because it’s new and it’s hot.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love my iPhone and I think its exciting that state and local governments are developing applications for it, to make it easier for citizens to interact with their governments. I salute the City of Boston’s initiative in developing an application that makes it easier to submit municipal service requests. But most of the people that live in Boston don’t own iPhones. Most of the cell phone owners in Boston don’t have an iPhone either - so why choose the iPhone as a platform for a publicly funded application?

The city might have been better off developing an application that worked on more mobile devices. This could have been a web-based application that worked in the micro browsers that come with older cell phones as well as the more powerful browser software that ships with iPhones, G1 phones and other advanced mobile devices. They might have even developed a voice/DTMF interface for people (like my Mom) that use their cell phones the old fashion way. If they had, a lot more people might have been able to use the new service.

The point is that the goal of Gov 2.0 initiatives should not be the deployment of the “hottest” applications on the platforms with the most “sex appeal.” Gov 2.0 initiatives, and all of the exciting new technologies they bring to the table, are good for one thing - helping governments do their jobs more efficiently. That’s it.

As more governments jump on the Gov 2.0 bandwagon, it will be important for public officials to remain focused on the goals of their governments, their agencies and their offices - this will require an intimate understanding of the mission of government and a well developed set of metrics to help determine if Gov 2.0 technologies are helping governments more efficiently achieve their goals.

With this in mind, it was extremely gratifying to see Beth Noveck (of Wiki Government fame, who leads President Barack Obama’s open-government initiative) say the following:

Q: How will you measure the impact of these [open government] innovations?

A: Developing recommendations on transparency and open government has to include a process for developing metrics. We can talk about the number of data feeds we’ve released, or the number of people who’ve participated in rule making [but] we really have to look at transparency and participation to a specific end. So if our goal is improving the quality of American education or increasing accessibility and affordability of health care, we really have to look at those as the metrics and ask ourselves, “How does driving innovation into the way the public sector works help us to ultimately do the job better of making those hard policy decisions?”

Here’s hoping that those involved in Gov 2.0 and open government initiatives around the country take the time needed at the inception of their projects to as the questions: “What exactly are we trying to achieve here?” and “How will we measure our performance so that we know we’re making progress toward our goal?”

Or, when in doubt, ask - what would Beth Noveck do?

New Project: Hear Me Say This

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones, Open Source, Twitter

I haven’t been blogging much of late because of a new project I have been working on — Hear Me Say This.

Hear Me Say This is a web application that uses the Sunlight Labs API, the Twitter API and the plain old telephone to empower citizens to send a message to the people that represent them in Congress.

The application uses the Voxeo Prophecy platform to support the VoiceXML and CCXML components it uses, and is hosted on a lean and mean Ubuntu web server. The back end is written in PHP 5 and uses a MySQL database. Its open source, and uses the latest open standards for developing telephone applications.

I’ve entered this application in the Sunlight Labs “Apps for America” contest — I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of telephone apps entered in this contest (the others all appear to be Asterisk-based, mine is the only CCXML/VoiceXML-based app).

Now that the project is done, and my entry has been submitted, I’m focused on adding features and spreading the word. If you’re interested in testing it out, give me a shout.

One of the other things I’d like to do in the weeks ahead is to convert the voice portion of this application to use Voxeo’s new Tropo platform. Since the back end of the app is written in PHP, and since Tropo supports writing voice apps in PHP I think it would be an interesting experiment to rewrite the existing CCXML/VoiceXML pieces as PHP/Tropo components.

I think this will provide a nice way of comparing and contrasting voice applications built using the more (ahem) traditional VoiceXML route vs. the new hotness that is Tropo.

Stay tuned!

Learning to Cook… From a Cell Phone

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones

It’s not easy to find someone more obsessed with phones than me.

Still, even I was somewhat surprised to learn how important cell phones have become in the kitchen:

It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up the names of French cheeses, set timers for steak and soft-boiled eggs, and convert European or English measurements to American ones.

“It taught me to cook, really,” said Kelli Howell, a college sophomore in Chicago, of her Nokia phone.

Maybe that’s why everything I cook is so bad. I haven’t been using my phone.

Using Twitter to Respond to Natural Disasters

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones, Twitter

Dan York of Voxeo has posted a great interview with Martin Murray of Public Service of New Hampshire (PSNH) detailing the utility’s response to an ice storm last month that knocked out power to a significant number of customers.

PSNH is New Hampshire’s largest electric utility, serving more than 490,000 homes and businesses throughout the state. The utility made extensive use of Twitter, YouTube and other social networking tools during the recent ice storm to provide information to customers impacted by the storm. This is yet another example of a creative use of social networking tools by a utility company.

Governments take heed! In some parts of the country (including my home state of Delaware) local governments are also the local utility company. But more than that, the creative use of social networking tools by PSNH should stand as an example of the different ways governments can improve their communications with citizens using these tools.

What a great service it would be to find out how long the wait is at the local DMV, or to find out how long the wait in the automobile inspection lanes are via Twitter. Or how about getting Tweets when trash or recycling picks up change because of a holiday?

There is enormous potential for improving the interactions between citizens and their governments using these tools. Time for more governments to get with it

Wireless Carriers to Sing Inaugural Blues?

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones

Interesting piece in the New York Times this morning about the steps being taken by wireless carriers to prepare for the inauguration. The industry is expecting throngs of young, text messaging, picture sending, status updating supporters of Barack Obama to show up and use wireless services at unprecedented levels:

The largest cellphone carriers, fearful that a communicative citizenry will overwhelm their networks, have taken the unusual step of asking people to limit their phone calls and to delay sending photos. The carriers are also spending millions of dollars to temporarily and substantially upgrade their networks in Washington.

It will be interesting to see how their last minute efforts to shore up their networks in the Washington DC area hold up to the anticipated volume.

Also expected to be hammered during the inaugural: Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. Should be an interesting day!

It’s Still All About the Phone

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones

I’ve been saying this for a while. Its all about the phone. Or, rather, it’s all about the cell phone.

More than one in six American households, or 17.5 percent, depended solely on cell phones for their telephone communications during the first half of 2008, up from 13.6 percent a full year earlier, according to survey results released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 13.3 percent of American households reportedly received all or almost all of their calls on cell phones despite having a landline telephone in their home.

Governments and other organizations that are looking to build or acquire systems to notify people using telephones should take note of this. Unlike traditional phones, cell phones offer a range of options for contacting people, aside from the standard voice conversation (SMS, e-mail, etc.). In addition, cell phones are geographically aware.

Next generation telephone notification systems will leverage the enhanced capabilities of cell phones to quickly deliver important information to citizens and taxpayers. Its time to start building them…

DC Crime Finder

Posted by Mark Headd under Cell Phones, General Discussion

The “DC Crime Finder” is a multimodal app that lets residents of the District of Columbia search for crime locations in their neighborhoods.

It uses actual crime data published by the District and supports a wide range of devices for looking up addresses and crime locations. The DC Crime Finder works with traditional desktop web browsers, mobile devices and PDAs, smart phones, iPhones, G1 phones — essentially any device that has a web browser and access to the Internet.

The application also works with ordinary cell phones and even land line phones. It sports a voice user interface (VUI) which makes it accessible from any old school telephone — even a rotary phone (if anyone in DC still has one).

This application is my submission to the Apps For Democracy contest being sponsored by the District of Columbia and iStrategyLabs.

Get the App:

The source code for the application is hosted on Google Code.

Its written in PHP and makes use of the HAWHAW PHP library by Norbert Huffschmid. This application should run equally well on Linux or Windows (I developed it on Ubuntu 8.04), but you’ll need PHP 5 with SOAP support enabled.

You’ll also need a MySQL database — the District of Columbia provides information on crime locations in a variety of formats, including real time XML-based feeds. For this application, I opted to go with data in CVS format that I imported into a simple MySQL table. One of the things the application does is to calculate the distance of crime locations from a specific address. I believe that this calculation is much more efficiently done in the context of a database, rather than trying to use a real time XML feed (there are a lot of crime locations).

The other requirement, if you want to hear this application on a standard telephone or cell phone, is to grab a copy of Voxeo Prophecy. This app should run on most mature VoiceXML/CCXML platforms, but Prophecy is by far the easiest to use and the most standards compliant. Best of all, its free to download and use. If your interested in developing other telephone applications, consider signing up for a free developer account with Voxeo.

Test the App:

I’ve set up a demo of this application in a test environment. You can look at the visual interface for this application (which uses a simulator to mimic the look and feel of a cell phone browser) by clicking here (demo is no longer active). Any mobile device with a browser can also access the application — the HAWHAW library uses some pretty slick device detection, so any device that can handle it should get standard XHTML. Smaller, or older devices will get old school WAP markup.

See what this app looks like in an older iPaq handheld device.

The beauty of this application is that when a voice browser (like Voxeo Prophecy) comes a knockin’ it gets its standard markup language - VoiceXML. If you want to hear this application on a telephone, simply dial (202) 684-7894. (demo is no longer available.)

Note: this demo is currently running in a test environment, so you may experience the occasional hiccup. A production deployment of an application like this would be much more robust.

Unfortunately, the demo is no longer active.

Why a Multimodal App?

“Multimodal Applications” provide access to services and information through different modalities. This application provides access to crime information, including the ability to search for crime incidents by proximity, through a wide range of different client devices include traditional web browsers, handheld devices and PDAs, cell phones and standard land line telephones.

Unlike other applications that are targeted to a specific platform — i.e., applications targeted to a desktop web browser, or to a specific handheld device — the DC Crime Locater can be accessed from a range of different devices. The application is accessible from sophisticated handheld devices like iPhones or G1 phones and from standard home telephones.

This Multimodal paradigm can be used to improve access to other types of government information giving citizens more choices in the devices (and modalities) they will use to consume this information.

Special Thanks!

Serious props need to go to the folks in the Office of the CTO in Washington DC. You don’t see very many government providing the kind of data that the Apps for Democracy challenge is based on. This innovative contest is a fantastic way to get development firms and independent developers (like moi) excited about building powerful applications.

Whether it’s the U.S Census Bureau, the federal Departments of Labor or Commerce, a state health agency, or a local police force, governments are the repositories of vast amount of information. Much of this data has direct relevance for our everyday lives, and can’t be obtained from any other source.

How governments make this information available for public consumption will define the debate on open government for many years to come.

I hope other governments follow DC’s example in putting on this innovative contest.