Real customer service from local gov’t

Check out Cities embrace mobile apps, ‘Gov 2.0’ on CNN:

A host of larger U.S. cities from San Francisco to New York quietly
have been releasing treasure troves of public data to Web and mobile
application developers.

That may sound dull. But tech geeks
transform banal local government spreadsheets about train schedules,
complaint systems, potholes, street lamp repairs and city garbage into
useful applications for mobile phones and the Web.

The aim is to
let citizens report problems to their governments more easily and
accurately; and to put public information, which otherwise may be
buried in file cabinets and Excel files, at the fingertips of taxpayers.

By
some accounts, the trend is turning the government-voter relationship
on its head and could usher in a new era of grassroots democracy.