The Journey to the Interface project
How service design can connect users to reform
Drawing on all of our public services work of the last three years, as well as over fifty interviews with service innovators in the public, commercial and voluntary sectors, this project explores the emerging discipline of service design, and what it has to offer to ways of approaching the transformation of public services.
311
12:00am Friday, 14th July 2006
There's a lot of talk of the single non-emergency line number. Introduced by Michael Bloomberg in New York in the form of 311, Demos is now recommending that the government of New Zealand try it out. With a population that's less than London's it may just work. Our own government here in the UK is also exploring the idea of a single phone line for non-emergencies. First mooted in Transformational Government in 2005, it is now being considered as part of the channel review that was announced in the 2006 Budget. That's due to report in autumn, so watch this space. For an interesting discussion, see Stephen Johnson writing about 311 in Wired. Concerns about such a service being 'captured' by particular groups of people are discussed on Accidental Deliberations.
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Comments
A Police non-emergency number (http://www.101.gov.uk) has recently been rolled out. I think this is a great idea, but some are saying that citizens shouldn't have to decide whether it's a genuine emergency or not.
IMHO, the problems facing a nationwide 311 are less related to population density than to diversity of service providers. Nearly all public services in New York are provided by departments of the city, so it's easier to put an umbrella over them. Rolling 311 out to the UK (for example) would involve coordinating all the local authorities, devolved administrations and third sector bodies who provide essential services. It's taking a hell of a lot of effort to pull limited services together on DirectGov (http://www.direct.gov.uk), so doing it with a call centre would be even trickier.