
What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York - linhir
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/11/ff_311_new_york/all/1
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T_S_
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.

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

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

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jonursenbach
You aren't alone.

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ramidarigaz
I dunno. The graphic seems pretty straight forward. The entire width of the
band is the total number of calls received, and the categories of calls make
up the components of the band. Wider band of color means more calls received.

The x axis is time.

Seems simple enough to me.

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joemi
But what is it actually straight forward about? All that can be gleaned from
this particular graph is that there are a lot of noise complaints at night, a
lot of streetlight complaints around noon, and that there's a larger variety
of complaints during the day. The rest is just pretty visual noise. Consider
the humps and valleys that occur when following the sections for "consumer
complaints"... The rising and falling of that line means absolutely nothing,
yet it obscures the line's own thickening and thinning to the point where it's
pretty useless.

A simple line chart (while not as pretty) would be even easier to read and
much more useful. You'd still see the major trends you see in this chart, but
the rest of the information would be useful instead of just noise.

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electromagnetic
I don't think the graph is supposed to be particularly useful to you, I think
this graph is more useful to the actual city workers so they can focus on
specific complaints at specific times.

There's no point focusing on streetlight complaints at 6pm, and there's no
point focusing on noise at 7am when the garbage trucks are going around.

Deal with the right problems at the right time gets a much better response
from your customers (IE the tax payers and voters).

In general you want to deal with the vast majority of complaints. The rising
and falling of the line is caused by _something else_ becoming larger.

You don't follow the line itself, but judge its thickness by placement on the
X-axis.

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iaskwhy
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.

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...

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AdamTReineke
That is something I like about cities getting Twitter accounts. I love being
able to hop on Twitter and type up a quick message to @CityOfAmes to complain
about construction or trees down in parks.

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luigi
We'll be working on a Ruby library for Open311 at RubyConf:

<http://sunlightlabs.com/rubyconf/>

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mhb
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.

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levirosol
I bet "streetlights" is referring to stop lights, not the streetlights along a
road.

even still, the point is valid. why do people wait until the day to call and
complain?

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frio
I don't live in New York, but I imagine they'd assume that the call centre
isn't 24-hour?

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lsb
It's advertised as a 24-hour line.

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rrrhys
Why do complaints for streetlights go up at noon?

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jimmybot
Probably that is because of calls made during lunch breaks. Or the complaints
could be about streetlights that are on during the day rather than off/broken
at night.

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henrikschroder
Why is there a bump in traffic signal conditions at 15:00, that doesn't follow
the bump in street conditions at 19:00?

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?

Fascinating! :-D

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electromagnetic
15:00 could be the switch to rush-hour signalling. I know where I live it
screws up turn-lights and pedestrian crossing lights. I've seen turn lanes
getting a single car through at every light change, it's gotten so bad that it
clogs up one of the through-lanes. Similarly there's rarely a single
pedestrian at a crossing, and I've been forced to J-walk because the
pedestrian crossing hasn't come on for several light changes.

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

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

