Monday, August 24. 2009

As Election Near, Another Mayor Offers Service Request Portal

Last week Gavin Newsom, Mayor of San Francisco launched a data portal for the city. He's going to run for governor of California.

Today Thomas Menino, Mayor of Boston launched a GIS portal that highlights citizen reported issues and their status on a map. He's facing two young challengers for his position in a primary in a few weeks. The site is called the "Boston GIS Data Hub."

It's built on ESRI ArcGIS API for Flex. The key reason for the map - transparency about service requests - is accessed through a special icon of a cell phone under the TOC title "Business Data." It opens up a multi-tabbed window that includes the ability to search for service requests and their status. By default they are not mapped. To map them the user must find a mapping button at the bottom of the spreadsheet of the matching records.

- Boston Herald

Posted by Adena Schutzberg at 07:30 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0) |

Comments

Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Looks promising, thanks for the heads up. Whether the election campaign was the impetus for launching this or not, even the most hardened politician would acknowledge that elections can "inspire" new ideas and projects.

We'll see if New York City can learn from these projects (see the city's Big Apps competition at http://www.nycedc.com/ProjectsOpportunities/RFPsRFQsRFEIs/Pages/Opportunity49_PC.aspx and responses to it at http://insights.appsfordemocracy.org/pages/22069-nyc-big-apps-ideas and http://barcamp.org/BigAppsDevCamp).

#1 Steven Romalewski (Link) on 2009-08-24 11:14 (Reply)

Add Comment

Name
Email
Homepage
In reply to	[ Top level ]#1: Steven Romalewski on 2009-08-24 11:14
Comment	Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_. Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images. E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly. Enter the string from the spam-prevention image above:
	Remember Information?   Subscribe to this entry