I recently came across a very interesting and innovative pseudo governmental initiative. The company in question is called DataSF (www.DataSF.org), which is based in the tech-savvy city of San Francisco. San Francisco came under the spot light again recently when the city itself initiated a social media drive to empower consumers and the general public through the power of Twitter as a "Twitter Service for Civil Complaints" ( www.sftwitter.sfgov.org/twitter ). The social media initiative allowed the general public to send through general complaints about their city or neighborhood to governmental officials and city council.
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This “Twitter Service” has advanced in leaps and bounds since its inception. The integration of other Twitter Services such as “TwitPic” amoung others that involve posting pictures through the social media platform, allowing the public to post images along with their complaints creating a bigger, more tangible source for the city’s government to relate to and source officials to visually assess the complaint made.
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This show of transparency long a long way when it comes to building city loyalty and active participation in the community, especially when it comes to a proactive community such as San Francisco. DataSF allows the government to highlight and digitally mark city information for locals and tourists alike. Unfortunately the service is only available for mobile devices such as the iPhone due to its application downloading capabilities. Hopefully they find a way to make it more compatible for other operating systems. The digital markings can also be viewed via the web on a specific governmental website, depending on your city. The system helps the general public view “Crime Hot-Spots”, “Museums”, “Recycling Depots” and other community based industries and interests.
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As explained by the website where I sourced the article from;
“While the web is disrobing many businesses in the name of transparency, the City of San Francisco is happy to expose itself. A month since the launch of DataSF.org, a public archive of government data, Mayor Gavin Newsom has announced that the site will now showcase applications, which manipulate that data to make it more useful and accessible to the city's residents. Inspired by the success of Apple's iTunes App Store and Facebook's open developer platform (60,000 and 350,000 apps respectively), writes Mayor Newsom, San Francisco is encouraging democratic participation by “giving residents the tools to build the kind of government that works for them.”
A number of apps are already online, with the new showcase expected to stimulate many more creations. Among those currently available, EcoFinder helps residents find out where their nearest recycling services are located, while Cabspotting—a project by the Exploratorium interactive science museum—displays a real-time map of cab locations in San Francisco.
It's not the first step the tech-centric Bay Area has made towards ‘Gov 2.0’—in June we reported on their Twitter service for civil complaints. But this latest effort could mark the start of a sea change in the way governments provide public information services. Don't let your local government miss the boat!”
(http://www.springwise.com/government/sfapps/)
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To take this blog local, trying to imagine the amount of “crime hot-spots” highlighted on the browser page would look like an adolescent’s over squeezed acne ridden face. The “highlighted spots” are indicates as different coloured circles on your mobile device or digital map. So, try and use your imagination and picture the amount of red and orange dots that litter your screen when pulling up to one of our fantastic registered “crime hot-spot”…pimples ‘r’ us I tell you!
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"The Pimple" - pin-pointing through the use of social media and crowd sourcing
An augmented reality and GPS pin-pointing
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I feel as though this movement towards a better Governmental 2.0 system and community will be valuable to cities such as San Francisco, London and Paris just to name a few, but bringing this closer to home…the enormity of our crime statistics in South Africa might just be too large to be contained by such a clean, idealistic and tech based initiative, let alone the lack of infrastructure at the moment in our governmental solution and communications avenues.
Gov 2.0 – friend or foe? Yes or no? I leave it up to you…!
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