Open 311 offers a way for cities across the country to adopt open, best-practice standards for collecting, managing, and sharing non-emergency information. At the core of this work is the belief that individual municipalities are often too silted, and that by creating platforms for technology sharing, cities can improve their residents’ quality of life.

In many cities, 311 services offer a quick way to request or provide information. From questions about permitting to complaints about potholes, 311 provides a direct connection with civic authorities.

And even though 311 offers largely the same information service in Chicago as it does in San Francisco, there are nearly as many one-off 311 technology solutions as there are cities with 311 services. Many cities run their 311 systems using closed, proprietary formats. The results are expensive and limiting, and new cities that want to offer 311 to their citizens are stuck reinventing the wheel.

In 2009, as Washington DC began to open up their 311 API, OpenPlans began work to help create what is now the Open 311 standard. We convened and coordinated efforts in multiple cities, and that fall we convened the Open311 DevCamp, an unconference where more than a dozen city agencies . The event and subsequent coordinating work have moved the open API specification forward.

The resulting GeoReport v2 API is now used in more than two dozen cities, including Washington DC, Boston, Baltimore and San Francisco.  By adopting an open API, these cities are no longer tied to single vendors for technology solutions, and they have empowered third-party developers and other citizens to build novel applications, such as visualization tools, hyper-local alert tools, and issue-reporting applications.

OpenPlans has lead the development and deployment of Open311 by working with cities to adopt the standards, building a community to maintain them, and encouraging developers to use and  incorporate the API in  public-facing apps like SeeClickFix, Ushahidi, and Connected Bits.

This initiative helped seed OpenPlans’ wider Civic Commons initiative, which coordinates an array of multi-city technology collaborations in partnership with Code for America.

Learn more

Open311 (project site)

Open311 is a Specification for an Open Platform

Civic Commons