Brown: iBurgh ready to redd up the ‘Burgh?

The Pittsburgh city government finally did something right! It’s amazing. It’s a miracle.

No, it’s the city’s adoption of a new iPhone-based application called iBurgh that is bringing citizens’ voices back to the forefront of community interest.

Created by those ever-inventive computer engineers at Carnegie Mellon with their YinzCam technology, which has been used at Penguins games for a while now, iBurgh helps expand upon community involvement by allowing anyone to upload problems they have around the city to the non-emergency 311 hotline.

Got a downed tree on your street? Send the city a picture. The house you’re renting from your landlord isn’t up to code? Send a picture of the hole in your bathroom floor and the insect residents who aren’t paying rent to live there.

What’s even cooler is that iBurgh will automatically link the picture you send to a map so city workers will know where your problems lie. There’s no need to text message an address with the photo.

The concept is genius, simply genius.

Long have I believed that Pittsburgh’s government is far too cumbersome for its own good. Between the city and Allegheny County, there are departments upon departments that seem to overlap one another in what they do. Knowing who to call and when to call can be overwhelming.

And if there is ever a need to go to a city council meeting, good luck. They’re all on weekday mornings, so priorities shift as to whether it’s really worth it to skip class and fend off Downtown traffic simply to tell the council about the cop who just blew through a stop sign.

It makes iBurgh seem like a wonderful idea, but I question its real-world value. When it catches on, I imagine the city hotline might become overwhelmed with inquiries.

Will the same number of operators already responding to 311 be burdened with even more phone traffic? I called the line to ask them myself, and I found out they’re only open weekdays for a little more than eight hours per day. They’ll have their work cut out for them to get it all running smoothly.

There’s also reason to be concerned with what’s actually handled by the city. If I had an iPhone, I’d take pictures of the panhandlers who are starting to migrate into South Oakland from Forbes Avenue and send that to the city.

If the iBurgh system runs on a first-come, first-served basis, I wonder what kind of sane person would handle my trifling complaints over, say, a water main break. There has to be some relevant and fair way to sort priority. I hope the city workers will know the difference.

But then again, if I were complaining about the same daring donation-taker standing on the private property in front of my apartment for a month with no city-led investigation while Pittsburgh is handling better things, wouldn’t that mean the iBurgh program is flawed?

We’re guinea pigs for a whole new way to make city residents relevant in governance again. While iBurgh will initially only be for the iPhone, it will become available to all smartphone users.

Boston is finalizing a more complicated version of the same kind of program called Citizen Connect. While it lacks the catchy name of our local software, I’m sure all eyes will be on us first to see how the idea works in practice.

If it succeeds, iBurgh will become a model for iPhone software in other metropolitan areas, bringing kvetching into the 21st century. And if it doesn’t, it will be the first time I’ve ever heard of a bunch of CMU students failing at anything. That sort of thing just doesn’t happen.

I believe that the biggest reason why participatory government doesn’t always work well is that it’s just too impractical. Showing up places, registering, waiting in lines and needing to have some semblance of sociability — who wants to do that?

If I call the city hotline, chances are I’m going to have to hold back from unleashing my frustration on an operator who doesn’t deserve it after waiting on hold for 15 minutes. iBurgh bypasses traditional, old-fashioned reckless venting.

Ideally, iBurgh will fuse practicality with a nagging sense of Puritanical tattling on local issues that will create a more efficient public works program.

Whether it lives up to that potential has yet to be seen. Word has to spread about its benefits, and it has to be implemented as a serious tool — not just a device to drunk text when boredom ensues.

It has all the makings of being the game-changer this city needs to bring a voice back to the people. All it really needs now is an infrastructure to handle it and a download from iPhone users who want the city to be fixed up.

E-mail Jacob at jeb110@pitt.edu.