Real Accountability

Someone posted a comment that I wanted to put on the main page about what accountability would mean. His comments sound like someone who knows about system analysis and how to make government accountable. That is what I've been talking about and want to implement.

There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal this week about similar crime mapping programs. The main ones are crimemapping.com, crimereports.com and everyblock.com.
Basically it is a tool for the police and public to use to track crime. Residents could see hot spot areas, what is going on in those neighborhoods, the type of crime, etc. The police can use those tools to target where officers need to be. They, of course, already do these things but it needs to be updated and made transparent so the citizens can be made aware and become partners in stopping crime.

Here is the comment from the poster:

Real accountability would mean:

*Realtime publicly trackable GPS for all DPW vehicles and its itemized jobs while assigned workers are logged for internal performance audits (callbacks, slow progress, etc.)
*Time-stamped publicly viewable digital photos documenting pre and post conditions, and work execution (including prep and obscured infrastructure, underlayment, etc.)

Of course the first step would be a complete integration of the above within a comprehensive dispatch coordinating system geared toward efficiency and non-redundancy.

Government is subordinate to the people and public servants need to be reminded who their master is.

Residents should be able to pull up an online map with dots showing the location of work to be done with a brief description -- accompanied by a set of moving dots depicting crews on site (with traffic disruptions specifically highlighted).

All the data should be open source, so members of the public can mine it to find out for instance; how much time is devoted to driving, or planting trees, or scraping paint, or power-washing, etc.

Good luck Kevin,

Jason Gordon
Brookline (soon to be Jamaica Plain)