City of SF now accepting complaints via Twitter | Hacker News Reader

City of SF now accepting complaints via Twitter

techcrunch.com

14 pointsnixme10 comments

When dealing with the government, I always believed that emailing was the most ineffective approach to being heard because emails are so easily ignored. Voicing complaints via twitter is a sure fire way to let gov't officials know that you don't care enough to actually do something about a given issue, like go to a demonstration, and your complaint will not be taken seriously.

SF is just getting good publicity from being "more open" and using in vogue technology, but they are actually making it easier to ignore people.

City of SF in the eyes of the public: +1

People's power to be heard: +0

They are not making it easier to ignore people per say, since they are not closing older ways to contact them. Still, they are not making it harder either. A good change would have been providing some way to follow-up and track progress of a reported problem.

Effectiveness of a government service is not in how many different ways there are to report a problem, but in how well it manages to fix it.

FTA: Once you submit a DM to @SF311, you will receive a service request number. Apparently, there is a city staff member devoted to handling and responding to @SF311 Tweets.

San Francisco is also using CoTweet, a Twitter business platform that acts like a CRM, to manage and track these conversations. CoTweet’s platform supports both marketing communication and response-driven customer support via Twitter.

When dealing with the government, I always believed that emailing was the most ineffective approach to being heard because emails are so easily ignored.

This is true for big issues like giving the schools more money and re-legalizing gay marriage. That is not what this service is for, though; it's for "there's grafitti at the intersection of Foo St. and Bar Ln."

Twitter makes it easy to report problems like this, which means the graffiti-removal crews don't have to drive around looking for things to fix. They can be dispatched directly to a problem location. (Of course, email and phone calls would work just as well... but when you are just wandering around, tweeting from your phone is easier than sending an email or calling them up.)

Even Chicago gets things like this right (call in a problem, crew comes and fixes it), so I'd be really surprised if SF ignored these tweets.

From their FAQ page, "When you click on "Follow 311," you will be taken to a Twitter page to enter your Twitter ID and password." Can't they find a more acceptable way to block spam and bots?

Why? I mean, this is stupid... wouldn't you want more info about a problem than 140 characters?

Actually I probably wouldn't feel like typing more than that on my phone in the middle of the street.. Maybe if you feel like writing an essay on overflowing garbage it might feel a bit tight.

Link to SFgov site about the service: http://sftwitter.sfgov.org/twitter/

I feel civic pride in knowing the government is committed to fixing any problem that can be expressed in 140 characters or less.

Well, you can send a link to a picture there, it seems reasonable: "pothole @ 345 Bryant Street http://bit.ly/9879809

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