This article investigates how communications advances affect citizens’ ability to participate in coproduction of government services. The authors analyze service requests made to the City of Boston during a one‐year period from 2010 to 2011 and, using geospatial analysis and negative binomial regression, investigate possible disparities by race, education, and income in making service requests. The findings reveal little concern that 311 systems (nonemergency call centers) may benefit one racial group over another; however, there is some indication that Hispanics may use these systems less as requests move from call centers to the Internet and smartphones. Consistent with prior research, the findings show that poorer neighborhoods are less likely to take advantage of 311 service, with the notable exception of smartphone utilization. The implications for citizen participation in coproduction and bridging the digital divide are discussed.

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This article seeks to answer the following primary research question: Do governments respond differently to citizen service requests depending on where those requests originate in the city? This study is particularly salient in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in response to police violence or the gross neglect of infrastructure in Flint, MI. Although numerous studies have been able to demonstrate bias in policing, few (if any) have looked at biases that may be present in other types of general government services. Empirical evidence has supported the claims by some that some cities were responding slower to service requests made in poor and minority neighborhoods than they were in the richer, whiter neighborhoods, but these earlier works were from an era before 311. The article seeks to fill this gap in the modern coproduction literature to evaluate whether advanced information technologies enable equitable responses by governments. The results of our 15-city study of 311 systems (nonemergency service requests made by city residents) demonstrate no systematic differences in how the cities respond that would indicate a bias against minorities and poorer residents. Unsurprisingly, the effects are not consistent across all of our sample cities. Although some cities have statistically significant differences showing slower responses for these neighborhoods and others show quicker, the practical differences are so small as to be of little concern during our study period (2007–2016).

The ISO 19100 series of international standards are not just standards for data exchange format (e.g. spatial data transfer standard) or a metadata; rather, they provide a pool of standardized methodologies and standardized conceptual schemas to specify geographic information in a uniform way in order to achieve the full spectrum of interoperability during geospatial processing. We propose a canonical model approach based upon the ISO 19100 series of international standards as a feasible and effective conceptual framework for the development of an interoperable GIS or its application. This paper applies the proposed approach to modeling a specific GIS application, multimodal travel guide system (MTGS) to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Based upon functional requirements of the MTGS, we show how application schemas for the MTGS in Unified Modeling Language (UML) can be efficiently and effectively developed both by the reuse of the standardized schemas of the ISO 19100 series and by the extension of the standardized schemas in accordance with the rules of application schemas in ISO 19109. We lastly demonstrate how the MTGS UML application schemas can be successfully implemented as platform neutral encodings, i.e., ISO 19136 -Geography Markup Language (GML), for interoperable information exchanges.