Field of shattered dreams: The real reason City Hall is dragging its feet on 311

adamg — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 10:30:13 -0400

Officials are worried that if they build it, people will come. As the Globe reported yesterday:

[Boston Chief Information officer Bill Oates] acknowledged a switch to the catchy and simple 311 could elicit a flood of new calls.

"One of the challenges of 311 is we don't want to turn the button on 311 and have a volume [of calls] that will overwhelm the capacity of the call center," Oates said. ...

Imagine: Give people an easy-to-remember complaint number and they'll use it. And next they'll expect the city to do something about their complaints!

Michael Pahre dials up some statistics on complaint numbers and challenges you to guess the city's current complaint number (no fair looking it up first) - on the right side of his post.

$4 million and two years for a database program?

adamg — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 10:13:13 -0400

Globe: Despite Menino's vow, a system to track citizen calls is still years away.

Somerville: Ha!

Steve Garfield: What are these consultants selling the city? Garfield then does a little research and finds an off-the-shelf application that could easily handle the city's needs for $149 a month.