New York City has a special phoneline – 311 – to deal with non-emergency complaints & queries. I have lost track of whether any of the various proposals to introduce such numbers over here have ever been implemented.
An interesting article by Steven Johnson in Wired magazine shows how this line is being used to provide much more than just help & advice to callers.
Each complaint is logged, tagged, and mapped to make it available for subsequent analysis; this analysis not only allows the City to respond more intelligently to problems, but helps detect patterns that might otherwise have escaped notice.
I wonder if we have anything like that over here. If 999 calls for example were intelligently analysed we might get much better ideas about what might be done to minimise unnecessary calls from the mad, bad or sad to which our only response at present seems to be official tetchiness, name calling in the press (eg the woman who rang to report the theft of her snowman), or the tweeting by Greater Manchester of all the calls they received in one day, just to show us what they have to put up with.
Such an intelligent system would be far more likely, I would have thought, to provide ideas for efficiency & cost saving than asking interested members of the public for their ideas on what to do with data, or relying on them to come up with their own analyses.
