The City of Philadelphia will release a free iPhone app for its 311 non-emergency call hotline as soon as next month, reports the Inquirer.
City Technology Chief Allan Frank is painting a bold picture for the application, which he tells the Inqy will let users “log requests for city services and track them from their phones.”
“Anything you can do with 311 when you call, you’ll be able to do on your iPhone, and then some. OK, you can take a picture of, say, the illegal dump with the iPhone, and you can geo-locate it for us with the iPhone. All that fancy stuff,” Frank said.
Frank says future edition will become more sophisticated, trumping other cities that have already released similar apps.
one of these days, the CTO’s office will have a website, where we can give you guys ideas for how this kind of stuff could work, right?
Idea number 1.
I want to be able to take a picture of a pothole, press “pot hole report” and it automatically GPS’s the location of the pothole… (i know its not that accurate, but being able to send a intersection or street adress with a iphone picture over 3G or WiFi like that would be AWESOME).
Give us the power to report problems, and you’ll have an army of iphone wielding nerds trying to help out.
Just like cell phone cameras can record people doing stupid stuff, and put it on you tube, if you give us a medium to record constructive information, and how to share it, we will!