This guest blog is by Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist with 19 years experience
and a great
blog, AVC.. He helps people start and build technology companies out
of New York City
One of Mike Bloomberg's
greatest achievements is the creation of the 311 service here in New
York City
Apparently Bloomberg is a
huge user of 311 himself and he calls all the time as he is driving around the
city, reporting potholes and such.
We had a pothole in our
neighborhood that I passed every day on my way to the subway. It was a big one
and I'd watch car after car pound the hell out of their undercarriage as they
made their way from Hudson onto Bethune street.
One day I stopped and snapped this photo with my Blackberry and posted it to Flickr (and then
automatically to Twitter):
I added the following to the
Flickr headline which became the tweet:
It would be great if you
could twitter these in like: @potholenyc corner of bethune and hudson
Of course I could have
called 311, like our Mayor does, and reported the pothole. But doing it this
way does a bunch of things;
1) It saves the cost of
staffing large call centers because computers can handle most of the processing
of messages like this. There will still need to be humans at some part of this
process, but the front end can certainly be automated.
2) You get an image of the
pothole which should help the crews who fix them evaluate the worst ones and
prioritize.
3) The photo and the twitter
message is out there for anyone to see. Ideally this message would get routed,
via something like our portfolio company outside.in, to the various local media in the neighborhood.
If the messages have enough metadata in them, you could even create pages of
local media based on the most common neighborhood issues (crime,
infrastructure, schools, parks, etc)
4) The public discussion
about the photo and related posts could be aggregated to create even more
metadata and further identify the highest priority issues.
We see this "public
channel" in action already with services like Comcast
Cares on Twitter. Anyone can pick up the phone and call Comcast and
tell them that their cable service isn't working. But the only people who know
about that are the person making the call and call center rep taking it. When
someone posts on Twitter that their cable service isn't working and directs the
message to Comcast Cares, many people see that. Some of them may be other
Comcast customers who might find out that their cable isn't working either. And
as Comcast Cares elevates the issue, gets it fixed, and reports back, everyone
gets to see that too. It's a huge win for Comcast. Anything that can make a
cable company look better is a great thing and the use of the public channel is
exactly that.
The public channel is just
developing. It's in its infancy. Services like Twitter and Facebook are
building key elements of it. But we need a lot more infrastructure to make this
happen. I do not believe that the way this will happen is the creation of
"enterprise services" that will be sold to local governments. I think
we'll see things like GetSatisfaction and Uservoice
develop that are consumer facing first and foremost that governments will be
forced to adopt.
My friend John Geraci, co-founder
of Outside.in, is developing a non-profit called DIYcity that is attempting to
spearhead a movement along this idea. If you are interested in working on
projects in this area, you should join DIYcity and start collaborating
with others who are working in this space.
The public channel is the
right channel for business and government. Most "customer support"
issues are not confined to one person (just look at the comments on my American Express
post for proof of that). So we should be using a public channel to
talk to companies and institutions. They'll benefit and so will we.
Thanks Fred for a great post! We’d love to hear your ideas
for making things better. Share then at PasstheBall.com and follow us on Twitter. Ideas get
better when they are shared.
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