The discussion page for San Francisco 311 technology

city_id should be domain name?

For the city_id, it looks like the existing practice is to use the city's domain name (e.g. "sfgov.org"), not the city's URL. I think the domain name is a better choice than the URL, and since this is also the existing practice, I suggest that the spec should say "domain name", both in the prose of the city_id section, and in the descriptions of the arguments to the "Select Service", "Create Request", and "Status Update" commands. Zestyping 05:51, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

What is a service?

I usually think of a "service" as something a government performs for its citizens. But in the "Select Service" section, all the "service_name" attributes don't describe city services at all; they describe problems. Should they describe services? Or conversely, should the API be expressed in terms of problems that need solving? Zestyping 05:55, 8 March 2010 (UTC)

I do agree that a "service" is something a government performs for its citizens, yet the user/taxpayer/voter thinks more personally subjective in terms of problems. The government then needs to think in terms of resources-work centers-union groups to schedule and determine capacity availability and scheduling. This might likely be additional back-end software to supports the 311 front-end.