About the Blog

I shall post videos, graphs, news stories, and other material. We shall use some of this material in class, and you may review the rest at your convenience. I encourage you to use the blog in these ways:

--To post questions or comments about the readings before we discuss them in class;
--To follow up on class discussions with additional comments or questions.
--To post relevant news items or videos.

There are only two major limitations: no coarse language, and no derogatory comments about people at the Claremont Colleges. This blog is on the open Internet, so post nothing that you would not want a potential employer to see.

Saturday, September 24, 2011

Best Practices in Our Backyard

The Los Angeles Daily News reports:

Dialing a phone to report a pothole is so 2005.

These days, tech-savvy cities offer residents smartphone apps to document quality-of-life troubles.

If you live in San Jose, Glendale or certain parts of Los Angeles, you can point your camera phone at your neighborhood problem, snap a picture, type a description and hit send. The app forwards your GPS coordinates, along with the picture and description, to a city official who can arrange a fix.

It's faster, easier and -- ideally -- cheaper than dialing.

Los Angeles as a whole is a little slow in embracing service via smartphone apps. The city encourages residents to call its 311 request system to report problems, but budget cuts have slashed 311 line staffing. It's gone from 24/7 operation to one that operates only from 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. weekdays - making it harder for residents to file complaints at their own convenience.

That makes the smartphone app all the more useful.

So far, two councilmen -- Paul Krekorian and Eric Garcetti* -- have embraced service-by-app options. Constituents in those East Valley and Hollywood area districts can upload photos directly to the council staff, who then refer the service requests to the right departments.

The Reseda Neighborhood Council is also experimenting with an app called CitySourced, which is used by Garcetti's office and the cities of San Jose and Glendale.


*Garcetti's communications director is CMC alum and Harvard MPP Julie Wong.

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