CSB Reports On Twitter

Readers may remember that I recently asked City departments to consider new ways to exchange information with residents. Considering my request to be an authorization to experiment, the Citizens Service Bureau -- working with Kara Bowlin -- redesigned its web interface and began testing social media.

This is a report from the CSB (@stlscb) about its first real week on Twitter:

At 6:14 pm someone tweeted about a problem with the signals at 18th & Gratiot.

At 7:52 am we entered the service request to the Traffic Division in our Cityworks system

At 8:12 am the Traffic Dispatcher saw the request on her screen and radio'd the info to the correct crew.

At 8:29 the crew had the signal fixed and radio'd the info back in to the dispatcher, who closed out the request.

At 8:50 am the citizen tweeted back that he was impressed with our turn around time.

Everyone's happy -- and not a single piece of paper was printed through the whole process ... the next step is to get Cityworks moved to the web version so more field supervisors/foremen can have real time access to their requests from the field.

Good work, CSB.