How Chicago is Using Data and Networking to Make Life Better
I just finished participating in an online event sponsored by Personal Democracy Forum featuring John Tolva Chief Technology Officer of the City of Chicago. John is responsible for a lot of the current e-government initiatives put forward by the city and particularly the Snow Tracker application. The discussion was wide ranging and brought up a number of interesting themes such as the leadership being exercised by the new mayor, the role of the aldermen and the way in which citizens were engaging with the new applications.
I had one question and one observation to make:
1. Could the ability of the citizen to monitor the effectiveness of city services (fixing potholes with See/Click/Fix) or the location and efficiency of snowplows (Snow Tracker) engender a revolution of rising expectations among the citizenry that may lead to disappointment in a time of budget constraint?
2. A process of citizen engagement with government will mean that citizens will expect a greater level of engagement going forward. Once citizens are engaged they will not go away.
Of course there are no real answers to these questions. Instead, what we have is a dynamic process whose end result is impossible to estimate but the process itself will have profound implications for how government services are delivered but also for our democracy itself.