What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York

BTW, Mayor Bloomberg instituted this service for all non-emergency calls to the City. right after he first became mayor. It was modeled it after the help desk for the Bloomberg Terminal. That service was pretty much the best help desk I have ever dealt with. Extremely focused on metrics.

I just wanted to thank you for linking to the full version of the article (rather than the paginated one).

Am I just stupid, or am I not the only one who finds graphs like the first one useless and impossible to read?

I didn't know there was a number you could call to let the city workers know something is not right in NYC. It's one of the things I really want to have in my city because most of the times I don't know who to call.<p>Examples: dead animal, street sign on the floor, noise, etc. Sometimes I call the police but they just don't care about stuff like this...

We'll be working on a Ruby library for Open311 at RubyConf:<p><a href="http://sunlightlabs.com/rubyconf/" rel="nofollow">http://sunlightlabs.com/rubyconf/</a>

It's interesting that people call about streetlights in the middle of the day, although they presumably notice the problem when it's dark, but they complain about noise right when it is occurring.

Why do complaints for streetlights go up at noon?

Why is there a bump in traffic signal conditions at 15:00, that doesn't follow the bump in street conditions at 19:00?<p>The latter I assume is because by that time, everyone has driven home from work, noticed problems, and phoned about them when they got home. But why only street conditions? Why not traffic signals?<p>Fascinating! :-D

They complain about sewers at 2:30 AM and 1PM

Imagine if all government institutions were this efficient and transparent, from health care, to taxes, police, and education.