And now, the local government is beginning to heed the call of smarter mobile tools.
City government agencies around the world continue to explore mobile applications to provide services more effectively and to reach citizens in new ways. And it’s not just for civil services — cities are embracing apps to highlight their own civic culture and even promote community action.
Here are 10 cities that offer mobile apps for citizens, tourists or both. Does your city have an app? What do you like about it? Let us know in the comments.
1. Calgary, Canada
The City of Calgary embarked on a
5-app pilot project to improve civic life, and
The City of Calgary Pets app was one of the top recommendations. Using the app, citizens can view adoptable dogs and cats, watch videos, and find key information about licensing and responsible pet ownership. For current pet owners, the app can help you find emergency vet clinics throughout the city.
To date, the City of Calgary Pets app has garnered nearly 10,000 downloads. The City of Calgary Animal and Bylaw Services group attributes an increase in people visiting and contacting city shelters to inquire about dogs and cats available for adoption to use of the app.
According to Jacob George, manager of corporate marketing and communications of the City of Calgary, the Pets app and other apps in their program ”provide yet another channel for the city to communicate in a way that is accessible and convenient for citizens.”
The app is available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices and was developed by
Purple Forge, a private sector company that has developed apps for municipalities, federal government agencies, politicians and advocacy organizations.
Another application developed by and for Calgary is the
Calgary Road Conditions app. Since its launch three months ago, the app has had more than 15,000 downloads. It was the first City of Calgary mobile app to reach the top of its category, making Calgary the first Canadian municipality to have a top-ranking app on iTunes.
2. Jefferson Parish, LA
Jefferson Parish, part of the Greater New Orleans area, is Louisiana’s second-most populous parish. The office is responsible for maintaining records for the district court, parish courts, juvenile court, land records, marriage licenses and elections among the community’s 450,000 residents.
Clerk of Court Jon Gegenheimer asked his top administrative staff to look at his office from the citizen’s perspective and come up with several apps that would be useful to the office’s patrons. Two immediate needs surfaced: a way for the public to have an additional, convenient and easy way to access election results, and a way for the legal community and other court patrons to easily obtain the requisite materials needed to run the court smoothly. The office worked with software development company
Touch Studios to develop
the apps — now available for iPhone, iPad, Android and Blackberry.
The
Attorney’s Toolbox mobile app provides the local legal community with instant access to courts’ docket calendars, fee schedules, forms and office contact phone numbers from their mobile device. Using the
Election Results mobile app, citizens no longer need to rely on the media or sit at a computer to access election results — election results are available in real-time, and the data is searchable by election date, candidate, office or proposition. The Jury Management Mobile App — not yet released — will let citizens reschedule their jury service date or apply for exemption from over 70 options.
Gegenheimer believes that as more people use these mobile apps, the number of phone calls to the clerk of court’s office will be reduced. Fewer calls, in turn, lets court personnel be more productive and focus on other important work.
3. Philadelphia, PA
Mertens found a feed from
Mural Farm, an interactive database of thousands of community murals produced by the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program. He joined forces with another Code for America fellow, Aaron Ogle, to build a mobile website that helps citizens locate and learn more about murals around them. Mertens says that after the
Philly Art Mapper was launched and supported by the Office of the Mayor of the City of Philadelphia, other CFA fellows walked into other public art departments in Boston, San Francisco, Norfolk, and Seattle and began working with more public art data.
The Art Mapper app allows users to find public art through a mobile, map-based interface. The general public can also tweet out photos with geolocation tags of public and street art to
@publicartapp, so that the results will appear on
ArtMapper.org.
Mertens feels the biggest accomplishment of Art Mapper the city governments’ understanding that it is okay to open up data to developers.
“If I show up at city hall and start saying, ‘Hey there, can you give me your data?’ people usually get defensive and assume it is for some sort of ‘gotcha’ project or story,” says Mertens. “But when you show them that local developers can build in a weekend what it would take a city months or years, they start to loosen up. Using public art data is a nice gateway drug — its innocuous, it doesn’t involve crime or children.”
4. Elk Grove, CA
Last summer, the City of Elk Grove debuted its first mobile app –
Ask Elk Grove“>Ask Elk Grove. The app was the result of Elk Grove City Councilman Gary Davis’s idea to provide a tool to enable residents to more easily interact with the city.
Using the app, residents can submit and track non-emergency service requests, such as graffiti, illegal dumping and nuisances. They can snap photos of the issue and send them directly to the City of Elk Grove staff — and view and track other requests in their neighborhood.
“Our goal is to reach every resident where they are,” says Davis. “These days, just about everyone has a smartphone with app capability. It is more cost effective [for us to provide an app].”
Previously, the dispatch team needed to visit a service location at least twice to assess a situation and then fix it, assuming the resident had taken the time to call, explains Davis. Extra steps can be saved with access to photos and descriptions sent through the app.
Other app features include a listing of public meetings and community events via the Elk Grove online calendar and access to City of Elk Grove news and information.
According to Davis, the app has assisted in faster clean-up of graffiti and, more importantly, in recognizing patterns and identifying perpetrators.
There’s a similar
Mobile 311 app developed by the City of Riverside and
Xerox, which handles over 400,000 calls per year. Riverside’s CIO Steve Reneker says about 20% of all requests are now submitted using mobile devices, eliminating about 80,000 calls into the city’s call center.
5. Sparks, Nevada
In January, Sparks, Nevada, became the first city in the state to launch an official city mobile app. The app lets users receive visitor event information and to search for restaurants, hotels, shopping, nightlife and parks, among other things. But the app isn’t just for visitors: Residents can use it to access city news, request city services or connect with a city official. There’s also an option to view the latest city softball standings and an “augmented reality” feature that allows users to see detailed information on local businesses and points of attraction using their smartphone camera and GPS.
The app,
Sparks, NV, is available for iOS and Android, with an iPad version slated to come out in April. The idea for the app first came from the city’s marketing agency,
RKPR Inc., as a direct result of the branding efforts the city had undertaken.
“Fundamentally, the city’s brand is all about economic development, and enticing people to spend dollars in the city, which will contribute to a faster recovery in a state and region that has suffered the most during the current economic recession,” says Adam Mayberry, community relations manager of the City of Sparks.
Tony Lockard, principal of the app’s developer,
InfoTechMobile, adds, “A native mobile app was the next logical step for us to ensure we promote the city to visitors and residents alike.”
Takeaways
Mayberry advises government agencies to focus on their audience and the information they expect from mobile technology. Once the app is built, you ought to have “a good team in place that can serve as advocates for the app.” He explains that the agencies that Sparks worked with “really helped to tell the story of why we needed [the app] and the advantages to the city over the long-term.”
According to Jacob George of the City of Calgary, “Governments need to understand that the mobile environment is constantly changing, and that there is still no clear platform ‘winner.’ Developing apps that run solely on one particular platform can end up alienating large segments of the population and can result in heavy criticism.” He also encourages updating mobile apps following their release because “citizens will notice.”
Christine Brainerd, public information officer for the City of Elk Grove, emphasizes keeping the apps simple and be realistic. “Think about how much information a person is really going to want to enter from their mobile device. Anything that can use a drop down, or pre-filled category will make routing it to the appropriate person much simpler and will have a better result from the person trying to enter the information.”
Louisiana Parish Clerk of Court Jon Gegenheimer sums up developing a mobile app in this way: “Think like a citizen. Get citizen input. Listen to the citizens.”
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