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Manager   •   almost 10 years ago

Islamabad Answers

How can citizens easily find information and access services offered by their local government?

There is only little or scattered information online about public services offered by the local government, and no simple explanation of the prerequisites and the steps required to avail those services. Can there be a way to provide simple, quick, and easy-to-understand information about public services to Islamabad residents, such as the steps needed to renew your driver license?

How would you generate the content to collect such information in one place, in a simple, easy-to-understand way? Should the content be validated answers by the community or added by a moderator? We encourage redeployment of existing open source applications where possible, rather than reinventing the wheel. For the web interface, consider redeploying Honolulu Answers (https://github.com/codeforamerica/honolulu_answers). For an SMS-based solution, condider redeploying Rahbar (https://github.com/codeforpakistan/rahbar-govcom).

  • 2 comments

  •   •   almost 10 years ago

    I see two ways to approach this.

    A community moderated Q & A site to answer questions related to local government and services.
    The model of "StackExchange" (http://stackexchange.com/) is very successful, however for local government the information will require regular updates so there should be a mechanism for site moderator to bring the answer with latest information to the top even though it might not have the most "votes". Several clones of StackExchange (http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/2267/stack-exchange-clones) already exist with some of them being open source.

    Another approach could be use of Conversational User Interface (CUI) (i.e. a bot) to provide information. Bots can be used to answer questions in a 'conversation' style. Microsoft Bot Framework (https://dev.botframework.com/) is one way of implementing such a bot.

  •   •   almost 10 years ago

    Every government office should have a 2 or 3 digit code, easy to remember, placed by government order on a very prominent place for visitors. The portal being discussed above, should give the ENTER CODE facility to simplify the search for the user, to land onto directly the relevant content, like TRAFFIC LICENSE RENEWAL PROCEDURE.

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