The 311 system has been in place in New York City since last March. I'm very curious as to the success/failure of the system, but the most recent report I've been able to find was from October. In that report, they estimate they'll log 5.5 million calls in the first year, and about 20,000 a day as of October.
They say the largest spikes during the black-out and after the Staten Island Ferry crash. This would suggest that the city doesn't do an adequate job sharing information with its citizens. I'd be interested to find out how many calls were the city "pushing" information to citizens rather than the intended purpose of the system to allow citizens to "pull" information from the city.
Cash-strapped state and local governments are discovering what millions of eBay aficionados already know: You can sell almost anything on the Internet.
. (link via beSpacific). Many of the agencies say they are netting three times as much as they previously had from their local auctions.
I see nothing wrong with this, other than that authenticity might be a problem. E-Bay's reputation management system goes along way to solve that. Still, shouldn't a forward thinking legislator read an article like this and see the possibility of something like an "auction.gov", where federal, state, and local governments across the country can place items for sale in a single location?
As gift giving season is upon us, it seems the perfect time for the Fed to releaseRecalls.gov, a portal for information on recalled consumer items, motor vehicles, recreational boats, food, medicines, cosmetics and pesticides.
As I was reading about this, I had one of those Tim Berners-Lee moments, imagining setting up a user agent to check my credit card purchasing history against the Recalls website, and then sending any matching items directly as a text message to my cell phone. But thats the future.
For now the site, which is a coalition between the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Coast Guard, Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Food Safety Inspection Service and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has a partnership with over 20 retailers, trade groups, and consumer advocate groups to help promote awareness of the resource.
If you haven't heard, the US Federal Trade Commission has recently set up a national Do Not Call registry. Registering with the DNC list will stop as much as 80% of telemarketing calls to your home. Telemarketers get the list from the FTC, and if they are found to be calling numbers on the list, they are subject to fines. Great idea, and something that has existed in various forms (especially at the state level) for several years.
This registry, which took me less than a minute to file (and only another couple seconds to respond to the email they send me), is part of the low level functionality that is essential to the success of eGovernment as a whole. This is the kind of thing that can spark public interest in the use of the internet to simplify their interactions with government. Sort of like a gateway drug for eGov. I don't know the exact numbers, but I've heard the site was swamped during its first several days, so it looks like the marketing was successful. Hopefully that translates into continued and varied usage by those hitting the DNC site during the first several days.
Here is a slash dotish thread documenting anecdotal experiences with UK eGov initatives. It is one thing to see surveys and reports, but to read personal experiences provides another interesting glimpse into why take-up of services hasn't been higher.
At the end of 2002 the UK had made 63% of public services available online. While lower than the 73% projected 3 years ago, this seems like an overwhelming success to me. I'd like to see figures for the US, Canada, Singapore and other nations deemed to be at the high end of the eGov spectrum, but even 63% strikes me as a higher than expected figure. Despite being lower than projected, the UK's Office of the e-Envoy still expects to have 100% of services online by the end of 2005.
Here is access to the official report.