Election year stunt? Maybe. Still, this is a great idea — exactly the kind of innovation that City Hall needs.
City officials will soon debut Boston’s first official iPhone application, which will allow residents to snap photos of neighborhood nuisances – nasty potholes, graffiti-stained walls, blown street lights – and e-mail them to City Hall to be fixed.
City officials say the application, dubbed Citizen Connect, is the first of its kind in the nation. It was designed as an extension of the city’s 24-hour complaint hotline for the younger set, making the filing of complaints quicker and easier for iPhone users….
The application, which will be free to download from Apple, will allow residents to use the global positioning system function on their iPhones to pinpoint the precise location of the problem for City Hall. After submitting a complaint, users will get a tracking number, so they can pester city officials if the problem persists.
More, please!
Menino’s spokesperson says it all:
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p>Should we have programs like this? Yes. Should the scope of the project be dictated by sex appeal? Not so much.
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p>The problem with Menino is that he treats technology as a novelty rather than a serious tool for tracking performance.
Boston was the first major urban school system fully wired to the Internet during Menino’s tenure, the computer to student ratio, which was 1:62 when he became mayor, was lowered to 1:4. Programs like Technology Goes Homes have provided low cost computers and training to inner city families and the Timothy Smith Fund, run by the City’s Trust Office has supported a vast number of inner-city technology initiatives.
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p>The great thing about the article is that it highlights several good young people working within his Administration, something the press doesn’t usually write about, either in city government or at other levels. No one wants a paper full of puff pieces, but there are people doing good work out there, and an occasional pat on the back for the unrecognized is good to see.
looks like it was printed on a 1990 dot matrix, is barely legible, and reports such crucial information as my daughter’s pick-up time as 8–23 instead of 8:23. What, are colons cost-prohibitive? And what happened to “free citywide wi-fi, Howard?
Probably went the way of many other cities, though a number of other communities were left holding the bag when the private sector companies delivering these services largely pulled out of the business.
What do you do if you do not have an IPhone?
Most phones don’t have built in GPS, high-quality cameras, and easy to install apps, so it wouldn’t even be possible for most phones currently. But a lot of people still do have IPhones, and I think it is great that a simple app like this can make a difference. We can expect that someday most people will have phones with similar capabilities and that Boston will not be at the tail end of the technology curve.
He recognized valid critiques — Yoon on charter schools, Flaherty on the city’s dreadful record with technology — and has done something specifically, in each case, to blunt those charges. I hope he follows through with them, and actually suspect that he will, but regardless of his reasons for adopting these plans, you can’t deny they’re strong moves, especially playing ahead, early in the game. Flaherty and Yoon will have to come up with new issues, fast.
every four years is hardly visionary leadership. Neither is the oft-witnessed game of Menino’s only discovering and pretending to address problems after the Globe, Herald, or Federal Election officials, or lawsuits expose the problems.
I believe I said it was smart. Smart does not equate to visionary. The sad fact of the matter is when an opponent’s best critiques are adopted early in a campaign by the incumbent, it softens the blow. Hence, ‘no one wants to get out of Iraq more than I do’ Lieberman winning the general, once he adopted a change in lingo. I only credited Menino’s political smarts; I did not credit his visionary leadership. (I’ve actually been pretty critical of him in the past.)
Visionary gave us that gash of an artery, and it is in danger of giving us a useless City Hall and a skyscraper our market wouldn’t have been able to fill.
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p>The more I read about Menino’s opponents (Yoon has hired Joe Trippi), the more I think their vision includes using the mayoral office as a step up to a “better” job — as if we don’t have enough of those in the Commonwealth.
No better time for proposing to an incumbant office holder a snappy, cutting edge, affordable, effective positive “solution” to an old fashioned policy that has been defined as a “problem” by the challengers.
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p>………. speaking as someone who hates getting lost in endless voice mail options
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It’s lower than the percentage of Bostonians who have met the mayor….
Seeing the mayor has been in office 15 years longer then the iphone has been in existence.
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And if I were trying to find the best cannoli in the North End, I’d ask the Mayor before I’d ask an iPhone.
The irony here is that Boston City Hall is so behind the times that its own employees can’t get any work done because its computer system is such a joke. My roomate works there and couldn’t event start working until after 12noon today bc the system was down – AGAIN. So yes to the ipod app – now on to real technology changes. HELLOOO 311!!!!