Overview

How many times have you wanted to call your local government about something in your community but didn’t know who to turn to or where to go for help? Potholes? Streetlamps? Parks? Transportation? Garbage pick-up? Business development? Community services?

What if there was a way you could easily connect with your government leaders on these issues and receive a status update when your particular issue was addressed? What if you could also see how many of your neighbors share your views and concerns? What if you could use, visual maps to understand how your community looks and compares to other cities? What if government was available to you 24 hours a day even on holidays?
 
Well, at PublicStuff.org, we’re in the business of transforming these “what if’s” into vibrant realities through the development of our mobile application that will enable people to submit and check statuses on service requests, gather community and geospatial data, and make meaningful connections with their leaders, community organizations and neighbors. This will streamline communication within their community and across local government agencies, eliminating the need to wait in endless lines and navigate frustrating phone trees. What makes our mobile application truly effective is that is backs into our powerful online portal where government representatives can access to manage these requests and interactions and where people can go to gain in depth information. This will allow collaboration between people and their local governments to increase transparency, accountability and civic participation throughout their neighborhoods.

Eventually, PublicStuff will be a model that can be applied in communities’ worldwide, offering access to government services and information to disenfranchised population groups. Additionally, organizations and businesses can work with communities and local governments to create partnerships and successful development models using our portal and mobile application.

The Challenges

These days we go online for everything from shopping to socializing to banking. In a day in age when people are used to managing their business at any hour of the day by getting text alerts when their bank accounts are overdrawn or their flights are delayed, these same people are not encouraged to engage with governments that operate from only nine to five, handle only paper documents, and do it all inaccurately and inefficiently! It is a result of frustrations like these that lead to an ever widening gap between governments and the people they serve.

Governments traditionally engaged people in public discourse through events such as hearings, council meetings, town hall meetings, etc. But participation in these types of events has been decreasing-- especially for the little, but important things that impact our daily lives. Things like street maintenance, garbage pick-up, transportation services, noise complaints, park cleanliness, etc. Additionally, lower income neighborhoods have more difficulty getting public services than their wealthier counterparts, primarily because of accessibility issues (Fannie Mae, 1997). It’s been found that lower income neighborhoods generally do not know who to call and where to turn to in order to get things accomplished and fixed in their neighborhoods.

Governments have attempted to solve these challenges by creating command and control systems, where a specific program and/or agency is created, coupled with performance management systems, all at an incredibly expensive price tag. Examples include 311 customer relationship management software and other costly and rigid communication tools. Ultimately, these command and control solutions end up creating bigger and more expensive government, that is too inflexible to respond to the complex and ever-changing needs of the community. A politicians worst nightmare is to create an increasingly costly government, especially if it is done without popular public support and buy-in. Governments are not up to speed with web 2.0 initiatives, not because they are unaware or do not care, but, because the large majority of customer relationship management software is unaffordable for most cities and requires major organizational restructuring. The traditional emphasis on process and high costs divert resources from the real job of serving the customer and engaging the constituents.

Persuading citizens that engagement will be met with accountability, persuading partners that private contributions will be met with public effort and tangible returns, and persuading civic organizations that community action is a strategy and not a maneuver are just some of the challenges that governments must address.

Our Solution

One of the best things about the internet is that it lets the kind of innovation and development that normally occurred within the confines of bureaucratic walls to happen across large networks of organizations and individuals.

There have already been millions of people who have collaborated towards creating goods and services that rival or even surpass those efforts of large, well-financed enterprise networks. PublicStuff is centered around the idea that if masses of ordinary people can peer-produce an operating system (Linux), an encyclopedia (Wikipedia), the media (YouTube/CurrentTV), a mutual fund, and even a physical thing such as a motorcycle (Tapscott, 2006), that online collaboration with government is inevitable. PublicStuff’s objective is to harness the power of web 2.0 to create a system that will bridge the divide between people and their governments, with the goal of increasing transparency, accountability and civic participation at the local level.  

PublicStuff’s two tier approach ensures that the needs of both government and public users are addressed so that truly meaningful connections and progress can be made between the two groups. To access our services, citizens simply submit issues to PublicStuff’s mobile application as they occur. Our application will have the same interface for every city in the nation, eliminating the need to navigate multiple websites and telephone trees. The types of requests can range from informational to actual service requests to mapping and more!

At PublicStuff.org they will be able to connect with their local government and address issues that really affect the quality of their daily lives. Not only does this allow equal access for all citizens, but PublicStuff’s aggregate community data, and user/ government/ local organization profiles, will help develop an online community space with meaningful data and information-- built by the people and for the people. This feature will make the process of engaging citizens in policy-making easier and less costly than ever before by providing tools to support knowledge creation and community building; two core aspects of digital-era policy making.

Our mobile application will only be successful if it is paired with strong participation from government representatives. Understanding the importance of this, we will provide web-based software platforms that will allow them to interact with their constituents. We will have comprehensive training modules to assist them in quickly setting up the software. Additionally, the cost of our program is a fraction of other CRM systems, eliminating one of the major reported barriers in reaching out to the public: high costs.

Highlights of our services

Highlights for the users of our mobile application:

1. Service Requests (ie. Potholes, traffic signs, crime, litter, parks, business, etc)
2. Web 2.0 (streaming video, interactive features, compatibility with external sites, etc)
3. Neighborhood Profiles with demographic information, hot topics in the neighborhood, etc.
4. Community Connections: Networking tools to connect with local leaders and community members
5. Dynamic data maps that are informative snapshots of community concerns and demographics
6. Community Data: Anyone can access real data on the types of services requested, what areas have the most requests, how many were responded to, etc.
7. User Incentive Model: Earn points for website usage and donate to local organizations
8. Many other features currently being developed

Highlights for government clients include:

1. Resources shared amongst cities, bringing costs down
2. Cost-effective alternative to expensive management systems
3. Simple to integrate and use
4. Access through mobile application and web
5. Annual subscription model
6. Web based, 24/7 service
7. Scalable packages
8. High security