Accelerator Spotlight- PostCode
2014 Code for America Summit: More than a Vendor- Partnering with Startups to Accelerate Government Innovation In recent years, a new wave of government-focused technology startups have appeared in the marketplace: Subscription-based, cloud-hosted companies that take advantage of technology trends to provide online services that are often significantly lighter, cheaper, and easier to maintain than custom-built solutions. These companies are looking to have a different relationship with the governments they sell to: as partners, not just vendors, working together to figure out how new technologies can solve today’s problems. These vendors are ready and willing to roll up their sleeves to help figure out what you need to improve your city. RecordTrac: Open Public Records Tamara Manik-Perlman, PostCode Watch the video online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNZfiKOGTqM&index=22&list=PL65XgbSILalVoej11T95Tc7D7-F1PdwHq Get involved with Code for America: http://www.codeforamerica.org/action
Recomendados
Recomendados
Más contenido relacionado
Más de Code for America
Más de Code for America (20)
Último
Último (20)
Accelerator Spotlight- PostCode
- 1. Tamara Manik-Perlman CEO, PostCode
- 2. Tamara Manik-Perlman CEO Andy Hull CTO Reed Duecy-Gibbs CPO
- 3. CityVoice Place-based community feedback via any phone Promptly Government & civic text message notifications
- 4. RecordTrac A platform for open public records
- 5. FOIA, FOIL, Open Records, Public Information, Data Practices, Sunshine Laws, Right to Know...
- 6. Public Records Requests FOIA, FOIL, Open Records, Public Information, Data Practices, Sunshine Laws, Right to Know...
- 20. Requests are Public Increases Transparency
- 21. Requests are Public Increases Transparency Reduces Duplicates
- 22. Keyword Detection REQUEST: Birth Certifica INFO ALERT !
- 23. Smart Routing
- 24. Simple Workflows 1 2 3
- 25. Data Analysis
- 26. Data Analysis Improves Compliance
- 27. Data Analysis Improves Compliance Informs Open Data
Notas del editor
- We’re a group of three co-founders who participated in the 2013 Fellowship and went through the CfA Incubator earlier this year.
- We’ve been doing product development and redeployments of a few apps that we built during the Fellowship last year—Promptly, CityVoice. We’ve also been doing user-driven development to build new applications that help governments tackle tough problems.
- But today I want to talk to you about RecordTrac, our flagship product.
- It goes by many names—public records, open records, right to know, public disclosure, freedom of information—but every state has a law obligating government agencies to respond to requests for public information.
- We’ve decided to focus on tackling the public records request process because it is a confusing and costly problem that is faced by every government agency.
- Although costs can vary widely, recent research has suggested that on average, each public records request costs around $400 in terms of staff time. For a city with 5,000 requests per year, this adds up to two million dollars in resources annually.
- But very often governments don’t even know how many requests they are getting or how much time they’re spending because there’s no centralized responsibility and each department may be handling requests differently. We’ve talked to public information officers who keep piles of sticky notes...
- ...others who sort through paper request forms...
- ...or the most sophisticated, who use spreadsheets, calendar reminders or maybe even web forms.
- The cost of staff time is significant, but more than that...
- are the costs in legal risk because of non-compliance with the law...
- … and the toll taken in the court of public opinion when government is perceived to unforthcoming and inaccessible.
- And as disorganized as things are for staff, I bet you can imagine how confusing it is for members of the public, who may not know how to make a request, where to direct it, or what its status is.
- Web technologies have been brought to bear on problems ranging from open data to 311 reports. We should be able to say the same for public records.
- That’s where RecordTrac comes in. The Oakland team built a prototype that launched during the Fellowship last year. It’s still in use in Oakland, with close to 6000 requests handled since the launch. We’ve been supporting the instance in Oakland and conducting user and market research.
- Based on this work, we’ve extended RecordTrac so that it is flexible enough to support workflows of government agencies across the county, and made it more accessible than ever. The key has been to turn the public record request process from a transaction into a platform.
- Make routing more explicit.
- We’re excited to launch this new service because we believe that it has the potential to make government both more efficient and more transparent. We’re offering attendees a free 3 month pilot to try in their cities and help us test the new features.