This is part two of my series on the open data scene.
Customer. Service.
The mere mention of these two words has been to known to send the most serene and pacific individuals into nervous fits of panic, anxiety, and rage. No one likes standing in the waiting queue. No one likes spending hours on the phone listening to bad hold music. No one enjoys working their way through volumes of obscure paperwork. There is something exasperatingly Kafkaesque about it all that makes us question our own humanity at the most fundamentally desperate levels. And nowhere is this horror more pervasive than in government departments and agencies that serve citizens.
This lamentable state of affairs is not necessary, insists a group within the open data scene. According to them, new media and cutting-edge information technologies could positively reinvent the way governments deliver services and take feedback from their citizens. No longer would we have to rely on the postal service, telephone, or carrier pigeon for reporting broken street signs and potholes. No longer would we have to set aside a whole afternoon at the Bureau of Bureaucracy on the other side of town for a simple permit or application. No longer would we have to run through the gauntlet of secretaries and receptionists to get a simple question answered. According to the scenesters, new media and information technologies could rid us of these headaches and usher in an era of convenient and humane government service.
I call this genre of open data ‘hypergovernment’. It’s government service for the digital age, where fiber optics cables are the new telephone lines and waiting queues. It’s government service at light speed – literally. An example I’ve heard thrown around a few times at open data events is Fix My Street. Fix My Street is an internet service that lets citizens report potholes, grafitti, excessive garbage, and burnt-out street lights – the quintessential citizen complaints – to their municipalities from the comfort of their own internet browser.
Hypergovernment scenesters are already hard at work dreaming up the next incarnations of services like Fix My Street. One interesting notion along the same lines is a service where citizens submit geo-tagged pictures of problems in their neighbourhoods. Currently, municipal workers have difficulty knowing whether multiple pothole reports at one street address indicate many potholes, or the same pothole reported many times. This might mean the difference between one work crew and ten workcrews. Photographic reports tagged with precise GPS coordinates could clear up this confusion and help municipal workers dispatch an appropriate level of response to fix the problem.
Overall, I think these kinds of initiatives would be fantastic. Government operations would become more efficient and citizen satisfaction would surely improve. Furthermore, easier opportunities for citizen feedback might encourage more citizens to engage and interact with government. Sure, these service aspects of government aren’t the sexiest, but they are also the most common form on interaction with citizens. If they become more painless, it’s probable that less citizens will be deterred from participating in civic life. Who knows… reporting potholes might give someone a taste for a more active engagement in their community. But even without the potential of increased civic participation, hypergovernment initiatives promise the possibility of humane, painless, and convenient government services in the digital age.
