As a software engineer, I can attest that there is no replacement for good issue tracking.
It provides clear insights toward actionable, reproducible, concrete problems within the immensely complex systems you build. It gives teams of any size a way to discuss, solve, respond to, or publicly close issues. It gives maintainers the ability to set precedent, to refer back to old issues, and to link to resources or crowdsource wisdom and advice. It gives people the ability to upvote issues that are common, and to add public comments to issues in the public domain.
My claim: the civic system of NYC is even more complex than even the largest software systems, so it's a shame that we have worse issue tracking.
I'm not the first person to have this idea, 311 has a public map of service requests, and Beta NYC has a proposal to build a system called CBDB (Community Board Database), which would be both issue tracking and Constituent Relationship Management software for Community Boards. You can read a summary of their research in their 2018 Needs Report. I recommend it, and this is undoubtedly an interesting proposal worth pursuing!
That being said, I don't think we should stop there or wait for CBDB to be finished before we start building issue tracking systems for our civic culture. Community Boards aren't the only stakeholder groups that need to keep track of issues -- we all do! If you're a bike advocacy group, a neighborhood parenting group, or just a group of friends who care to improve things: consider having a public issue tracking board! It's simple to setup, and it will be a permanent, public archive of the things you are doing to improve New York City.
The only real piece of advice I'd give you is to have a high bar for issues, here's what makes a good issue:
- clearly describe the problem
- include pictures, examples, screenshots
- what was the expected behavior?
- what was the actual behavior?
- provide clear steps about how to find the problem for yourself, if it would be difficult to replicate
That's it! Issues are concise, direct, descriptive. They make concrete statements about the the system, rather than including any rhetorical flourishes or strategic language. If you create good issue-tracking culture with your friends, it can change the game -- turning the task of Building a new Civic Society into an open-source project.
As for me, I’ll be building a public issue tracking board for my friends and I, and for our neighborhood in Brooklyn CB 1. I’ll give a short update once I finish setting it up.