For those who would like to see some examples, the descriptions below provide a narrative tour of project ideas from different cities.

Watch Group Connect
Involving citizens in public safety efforts is critical for successful crime prevention. The number of neighborhood watch programs have grown substantially nationwide over the past decade. In Seattle, while these efforts have shown success in monitoring and reducing criminal activity, groups are largely grassroots and disconnected from one another. The city would like to implement an online collaboration platform to achieve two goals. First, create a common online space that will promote communication not only between members of a watch group, but also among groups city-wide. Tips, tools, and best practices would be available to share, and integrated with mainstream online social networks, improving the communication for existing groups and removing organizational obstacles to creating new ones. For emergency responders, this platform enables better communication between citizen and city services, and creates a crowd-sourced database of citizen concerns to improve tracking and trends. Social networks would put names to faces for police offices, fire fighters, and other first-responders, building trust and relationships with city-dwellers.

Integrated Business Permitting
Entrepreneurship and small business development are vital to creating the jobs and economic activity that define dynamic cities. However, opening a new business in any city requires coordination between many different departments, from submitting building plans and applications to securing necessary health permits. All of which can present a cost-prohibitive hurdle to fledgling ventures. A transparent, integrated permitting system can simplify the experience of a business owner, while reducing administrative costs and increase fee revenue for the city. A business workflow would guide proprietors through a series of increasingly detailed questions to summarize fee costs, permit requirements, and estimated time line specific to their proposal. A central document submission area would allow different departments to access this documentation without the duplication and legwork required to submit separately. Meetings and inspections would be scheduled on a single calendar to ease compliance. Progress along the work flow would be tracked online, improving business planning for entrepreneurs and fee revenue forecasts for the city.

Civic Engagement Portal
Effective community organizing helps create cities that reflect the culture of citizens and better respond to their needs. Seattle is also interested in developing a civic engagement portal that would be powered by the city and would help community groups post projects, allow citizens to search for volunteer opportunities, and connect planning and city council decisions to neighborhoods. Online tools reinforce offline community building. Concerned citizens would sign up for their issue areas to find relevant nonprofit groups, receive issue alerts, and connect with like-minded neighbors through social networks. The city government would develop a valuable list of active citizens to improve neighborhood strategy planning, staff effective community councils, and recruit volunteers for civic projects using low-cost communication tools like email and text messages.

FourSquare for Urban Trees
The Urban Forestry Department of a major US city is facing significant budget cuts. How do they continue to maintain the same number of trees on a smaller budget?  Because the trees must be pruned and watered on particular schedules, it has up until now been too cumbersome to ask citizens to take on some of the care of the trees near where they live, and the incentives of citizens to do so has been unclear.  But the city keeps detailed records of the maintenance schedules for each individual tree in their care, and it’s now relatively easy to publish that data in a format that citizens can access. Code for America imagines a combination web app/mobile application that lets citizens look up any given city tree and either report back data about the tree’s condition or take the prescribed next action (watering, pruning, etc) and report that back. Citizens could earn badges or points for their actions, become “mayor” of certain trees, brag about their service on Facebook or any other social network, and even tie into a rewards system supported by the city.  Every tree that is adopted, even partially, by a citizen, would represent a savings to the city’s urban forestry department.