The city of Anchorage is investing in a new approach to technology, aimed at expediting services to citizens.
Last month, the city hired its first Chief Innovation Officer, part of a strategy to bring government data right to residents.
Brendan Babb and I stared at a pothole in Midtown Anchorage as he fished out his iPhone.
“Of course my phone’ll probably die during this example,” he said, showing me an online tool the municipality launched to report these kinds of pesky infrastructure problems.
“I would just go to Muni.org, there’s an icon, or you can go to muni.org/ancworks,” Babb said, shielding his screen from the sun. “Now I can submit a new request.”
You enter some info, and basically generate a report letting the city know there’s a pothole to be fixed.
“Maybe at the end of your block there’s a stop sign that’s down: you can just go and report the information and submit it and it’ll generate a ticket number,” Babb said energetically. “You have a number you can check in a couple days and see how far along the process is.”
Babb was hired in May by the Berkowitz Administration for the new position. His job is to start thinking up ways to use technology and data to improve how the city delivers service to customers. Which is to say: residents.
“The idea is kind of like being able to check on your Amazon order to see, ‘oh, has it been sent? Where’s that at?’ The level of detail will grow as it evolves, but right now you’ll just know that someone’s already working on it.”
This kind of civic-minded tech is just a few years old, according to Babb, but larger cities like Chicago and Boston have started hiring innovation officers to make city services smarter. The hire fits within the administration’s open data initiative, which is premised on treating all the information collected by the city as potentially available for analysis. And that relationship goes both ways.
“My pitch is to get data to flow to residents more easily, and where they’re already looking,” Babb said.
He offered a recent example. “We just did health-inspection in Yelp! People are already looking for restaurant information there, so let’s put muni information right where people are looking.”
The other part of the equation is essentially finding a way to crowd-source information from all over the municipality.
According to Babb, there are way more residents encountering pot-holes in their neighborhood than there are city employees able to hunt them down. And when you take a step back from all the pot hole reports, it might just be that officials start seeing something they didn’t even know to look for.
“Maybe when we get the most pot-holes we get additional help to fix potholes, or pot-holes just keep popping up on this one street. Is there something we can analyze to see if there’s something with the build of the road that makes potholes more susceptible here?” Babb rattled off.
“I think it gives us more data, and a chance to optimize the work force we have and use them more efficiently.”
According to a city spokesperson, Babb’s total compensation is worth $140,000 in salary and benefits.
Zachariah Hughes reports on city & state politics, arts & culture, drugs, and military affairs in Anchorage and South Central Alaska.
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