Open311 and the Open Government Initiative

The pervasiveness of the open web is taking hold in governments around the world. Data is migrating to the cloud, being opened up to developer innovation, and governments are capitalizing on this trend. The federal government launched the data.gov site to expose the huge amounts of data its different branches continue to collect and make it available to developers to build compelling application mash-ups. Local governments are following this lead. The Open311 initiative is an association of local governments from all around the world whose mission is to allow a more transparent flow of information amongst themselves and their citizens. They accomplish this by exposing their services via APIs that developers can use to build useful application mash-ups and creating a feedback loop: information is presented to citizens, but citizens are also crouwdsourced to feed information back to local governments. Examples abound, but a few of interest:

• Reporting graffiti in a specific neighborhood
• Reporting a broken parking meter
• Updating neighborhood information that may be outdated

Communications can be significantly leveraged to enhance many of these mash-ups. Speaking to the parking authority live when the meter in your parking spot is not working, calling to find the closest county park or subscribing for SMS updates when a particular issue you reported has been resolved (ex. pothole is fixed) are but a few examples of what is possible. Of course, Ribbit can enable all of these mash-ups leveraging its cloud-based communications API and associated SDKs.