Equity must be considered when building resident 311 services, expert says
An aerial view over Boston on Aug. 14, 2026. Austin DeSisto/NurPhoto via Getty Images
While tools aimed at increasing the public’s engagement with local officials sound like a straightforward solution, policymakers should consider unintended negative impacts they can have on certain populations, according to new research.
As officials look to expand residents’ access to and use of digital government services, equity in how such tools are designed must remain a priority, according to newly released research.
Cities across the U.S. are building digital and mobile-first services, like apps or text channels, through which residents can request road repairs, report litter or ask for snow removal on their street.
Boston did so in 2015, when the city launched the Boston 311 platform to streamline how the city collected and responded to resident complaints sent via its citizen app, phone calls and website. But such initiatives can reveal a “double-edged role of digital technology in civic participation,” reads a report released last week by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
While increasing the number and types of touchpoints with which residents can interact with public services can “definitely [be] a tool for efficiency” for agencies to identify and resolve issues, such efforts can impose an “inadvertent twist” on how different communities are served, said Catherine Tucker, report author and a professor of management science and marketing at MIT.
The MIT report points to Boston’s modernization effort, which aimed to “broaden and facilitate access for residents who wanted to participate in the civic process,” the report reads. But the effort also suggested “how mobile technology integration can facilitate gentrification,” according to researchers.
The Boston 311 upgrade entailed connecting backend IT systems that combined the separate reporting channels into a single stream of data and also expanded the types of complaints residents could file, Tucker explained. That means residents could now submit complaints against other people violating city codes in addition to requesting general city services like graffiti removal.
An analysis of city records and census data from 2011 to 2019 of more than 1 million cases found that the time to resolve complaints significantly decreased after the integrated platform was implemented.
Indeed, between July 2011 and July 2015, the average resolution speed of complaints submitted separately through the city website, phone calls and app ranged from approximately a day to 2.5 days, according to the report. After system integration, the average range of time to resolve cases decreased to about half a day to 1.5 days.
However, data also showed that “higher-income neighborhoods are more likely to submit multiple enforcement requests simultaneously via the app, leading to faster resolution when complaints are geographically concentrated and, consequently, to unequal neighborhood outcomes,” the report reads.
MIT researchers identified similar trends in 311 data from other cities and municipalities, including New York City; San Francisco, California; Houston, Texas; Miami-Dade County, Florida; and Oakland, California, Tucker said.
“The [Boston 311] app was set up with the best of intentions,” Tucker said, but “perhaps less consideration was given [to] what was done with the data and how it was used.”
For instance, oftentimes 311 systems “for sending out people to deal with stuff is just based on efficiency and traditional ways of trying to optimize a route,” and “what was probably missed here was the interaction between two very different IT systems” of complaint data and resolution responses, Tucker explained.
Additionally, “an omnichannel approach” to 311 service requests “can inadvertently benefit those who have disparately privileged digital access to the system,” the report reads.
And as government agencies increasingly turn to artificial intelligence to further optimize service delivery, Tucker said such disparities could worsen as AI models can perpetuate biased outputs.
“This underscores the need for policymakers to consider the broader social effects of digital civic tools and ensure they do not exacerbate existing inequalities,” the report reads.
Policymakers should consider “incorporating equity-aware design elements into prioritization and routing algorithms … Agencies might explicitly account for neighborhood characteristics when allocating inspection capacity, ensuring that service speed is not driven solely by complaint volume or clustering,” according to the report.
Tucker added that an internal filter system, for example, could help municipal staff better identify if a group of complaints appear to be sent from a single resident or are low priority “rather than treating each complaint as equal.”