The city of Honolulu and IBM are transforming how citizens interact with government. By providing transparent and secure access to city data, Honolulu supports services in a cloud. This enables citizens to create exciting new services themselves which fosters greater civic engagement and encourages dialog between government and the public.
Connecting people to data
Although Honolulu had successfully overhauled its infrastructure, this was only the starting point for another major project. When the city underwent a change in political leadership, the then elected mayor, Peter Carlisle, shifted focus toward improving government transparency. Gordon Bruce took note of the mayor’s goal: “The mayor was behind transparency from the beginning. He wanted to make real data available to citizens—data they could actually use.”
In addition, the city wanted to increase citizen participation in government and improve efficiency, but achieving each of these goals would require new approaches to take full advantage of Honolulu’s new IT systems.
notable applications available to Honolulu citizens include:
· Honolulu Tsunami Evacuation Zones: Provides information and maps on tsunami evacuation zones
· DaBus: Provides exact, real-time bus locations and estimated wait times for riders
· Adopt-a-Siren: Enables citizens to adopt tsunami sirens in their neighborhoods, checking to ensure siren functionality and reporting this information to the city
· Kokua: Provides real-time traffic report information for Honolulu
· Festivals of Hawaii: Provides information on events such as film, music, and food and wine festivals
· Honolulu Map and Walking Tours: Provides maps and self-guided walking tours of the city
Providing an IT solution to support custom applications like these introduced a new level of citizen involvement for Honolulu. The city also learned a valuable lesson and a benefit to using its cloud environment. Instead of relying on city employees to create applications, which often required excessive time and effort to complete, the city could put unfinished applications into the cloud and enable citizens to help with development. Delivering new services with numerous benefits to the community, Honolulu’s solution helped the city to provide previously closed information to its citizens. This provided more transparency and helped to improve citizen participation in government. With its new cloud environment, Honolulu empowered the general public to create citizen-centric applications with access to years’ worth of city data. The city’s new work order system also employed citizens to report problems and improved the city’s efficiency for performing repairs. These innovative measures enabled the community to take full advantage of Honolulu’s IT systems and the city’s data.
Become an involved citizen take the first step by checking out what is currently available take a look into the future and see how you can help. Click here to get started.
Until next time best wishes from your Lavanet support team……