Boston 311

After Amy and I bought a condo in the polish triangle neighborhood of Dorchester two years ago, I began to feel that I should be engaged in local civic life. I joined the neighborhood civic assocation – the McCormack Civic Association – started reading the local newspaper (The Dot News), and gave disappointed looks towards vagrants, overgrown yards, and other people’s dog’s feces.

A few months later, my attendance at the association meetings had lapsed. But I had discovered one form of civic engagement that I embraced in a persisting way: the city of Boston has a smartphone application then called “Citizen’s Connect” and now called Bos311 which allows anyone to submit a request for city services by snapping a picture and writing a brief description. There are two immediately apparent advantages about this application: first, reports are geocoded with the GPS location. This means that I don’t have to figure out the nearest street address and laboriously type it into my phone. This is especially important during the cold winter months. Second, I don’t have to deal with the shame of presenting my petty request in front of a real live city employee. I’m not always a big believer in the ability of digital technologies to solve big important problems, but in this case technology is being used to do what it does best: it makes it just a little easier, a little less time consuming, a little less risky to do something that had previously been just a tad too effortful or too awkward or cognitively taxing.

I probably make up a fair share of the Bos311 reports from my part of the city. When I walk the dog, I look for litter, overgrown lots, burned out street lights, broken street signs, and I like to think that I’m bringing a little attention to my part of town.

Reporting to the city is not always successful. There are limitations to the Bos311 application: there is no way to follow up on a report, see its progress, provide feedback on a case considered closed, edit its content in case of error, etc. When you encounter these limitations you have to follow up using the Mayor’s 24-hour hotline (often helpful, sometimes not, depends on who you get) or the very web 1.0 ticket database portal that is the backbone of the system but lacks the friendly user interface of the smartphone application.

I think it is great that the city is devoting resources to making applications like Bos311, and Bos311 is clearly a step in the right direction from the earlier Citizen’s Connect application, but there’s only so much that can be done by improving UIs.