No, it's not Wikileaks. It's Asknola.com a privately operated "civic engagement platform" for reporting and mapping water leaks, potholes, and other broken stuff around town. From all appearances, it is at best it's a useful tool for expediting infrastructure repairs. At worst it's a harmless but informative service. Naturally, the city hates it.
For those eager to help improve New Orleans, the site may seem like a godsend. There's just one catch: AskNOLA.com doesn't deliver what it promises, at least according to top aides to Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
"It's not the city of New Orleans' website," Deputy Chief Administrative Officer Ann Duplessis said last week. "We're not getting the information. ... We have no clue what is being submitted."
Why would Duplessis be so concerned about this? It's hardly the first time anyone has employed a website to highlight potholes or water leaks
or street light outages or farcical clusterfucks involving electrical repair jobs that destroy sewer lines and create unsightly sludge ditches where sidewalks used to be.
Meanwhile, local Twitter users are working day and night to thwart law enforcement efforts. Certainly this should be considered a "rogue endeavor" by Duplessis' standard. AskNOLA looks to be just another place for local cranks to bitch about potholes. Why is the city "doing everything it can to shut it down" and not making the same complaint against Twitter?
Well, for one thing, Twitter isn't pretending to be an actual city service.
During his October budget address, Landrieu announced that his administration this year would re-create the city's toll-free 311 hotline and AskNola! would be its new name. Unlike in the past, he said, the system would allow the city's customer-service agents to access departmental files and provide callers with updates on what has been done in response to their complaints.
...
The website's founder, Timothy Garrett, incorporated AskNOLA LLC on Nov. 12, about a month after the mayor's speech, according to the Louisiana secretary of state's records. Garrett registered its service mark, a stylized fleur-de-lis in a diamond frame, on Dec. 10, records show.
Garrett created a website called "AskNOLA" which claims to be an improvement upon 311 just after the Mayor announced his intention to replace 311 with a system called "AskNOLA." Certainly this is not a coincidence. Furthermore, the language on AskNOLA.com appears to lead visitors to believe it is working in concert with city departments.
Garrett said in an e-mail message that he launched the site in early October and worked out all the kinks by Thanksgiving.
An electronic notice he circulated among neighborhood organizations lays out the project's purpose.
"Would you rather not be on a first-name basis with the city's 'info hotline' operators?" it says. "Got better things to do than dialing 3-1-1 and waiting for the prompts? Good news: The new AskNOLA.com website is now open and operating, complete with mobile apps to save you time."
Where do reports go?
Every report submitted to AskNOLA.com "is sent directly to a representative of the responsible department(s) at City Hall, or other municipal and state agencies," Garrett said.
"In every case, I established one or more contacts with each department and got permission to forward incoming reports, complete with a brief description and GPS coordinates of the problem and its location on a map," he said, adding that reports are transmitted by e-mail.
In other words, all the site actually does is collect your complaints, put them up on a pretty map for you... and then it presumably emails the city about them; a process which may or may not be as effectual for individual users as... say... calling 311. Since the Times-Picayune began reporting on the city's complaint against AskNOLA.com, the site has added a disclaimer which tells us exactly that.
AskNOLA is provided free of charge as a public service to Orleans Parish residents,and is not affiliated with nor officially endorsed by the City of New Orleans. This service provides no guarantee that issues reported here or using the CitySourced mobile application will be received by the correct agency nor resolved in a timely manner. Users are therefore advised to consider reporting issues separately to each relevant department where applicable, such as by calling 3-1-1. NO PERSONAL INFORMATION IS RETAINED OR SHARED BY THIS SITE
Before this disclaimer went up, AskNOLA.com could be easily confused with a nascent official City of New Orleans online reporting system. And the confusion was clearly intentional. My best guess is that Garrett saw an opportunity to squat on Landrieu's proposal and create a model for that proposal he could then sell back to the city. i don't know a whole lot about entrepreneurship myself but this looks to me like an opportunistic deception on Garrett's part and something the city probably has a right to be peeved about. Of course, declaring a private website "rogue" and looking into "shutting it down" rather than just explaining the actual offense to people doesn't seem the best way for the city to go about handling the issue. But stupid overreactions to "threatening" information on the internets are increasingly the norm these days.
Anyway if you know about any potholes you'd like to tell me about, please go right ahead. I don't expect I'll do any better than you at getting them filled, of course, but maybe the next time I'm stuck in line behind the Mayor at the coffee shop I'll tap him on the shoulder for you.
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