Our Goals:

1. Make it easier for the less affluent to speak up

Affluent residents make 311 calls at a higher rate than the non-affluent. By making the complaints-submission process easier, we plan to send more help to those who need it the most.

2. Use the data we collect to help create good policy

The data we collect will be publicly available. And because we have now made 311 more accessible to the underprivileged, our data will have less bias than any existing 311 data. This data can be used by policymakers, free of charge, to find more effective, and localized solutions. For example, a site for chronic littering can receive a trash can quickly. A large number of commuter requests in an area can quickly warrant a new bus route.

3. Make government complaints response more efficient

After processing millions of complaints, the Text311 team will have the insights necessary to simplify the complex, highly-fragmented and time-consuming customer service system of New York City. We soon hope to be able to help rebuild it from the ground up.

We hope to use techniques such as image metadata extraction, computer vision recognition, and natural language processing to help governments process incoming complaints faster. Ultimately, this results in a win for citizens, who now have to wait only hours and days instead of weeks and months for their problem to be solved.