SF311 and its Open311 Write API
San Francisco opened 311 in March 2007, folding more than 1,000 city phone numbers into one line. In May 2010 it agreed the Open311 GeoReport v2 specification jointly with Washington D.C., whose 311 API the standard grew out of, so outside apps can write into the city's work queue rather than only read from it. Every case since 2008 is published nightly under a public-domain dedication. The city set 12 July 2025 as the shutdown date for that write API, then let it stand; it was still returning live requests in July 2026.
Live
📅 since 2007
✔ Editor-reviewed
📊 Impact
872,426 service requests created in 2025, counted directly from the city's own open dataset: 534,032 through a mobile app (61%), 181,123 on the web (21%) and 149,757 by phone (17%), with 6,139 from agency integrations and 830 by Twitter or email.
🎓 Lesson
An API that only reads makes watchers; one that lets outsiders write makes competitors, and the city moved to shut its write endpoint the year a volunteer app began outfiling the official one. Its own Controller had already told SF311 to tighten internal controls so that requests are accurately addressed and its published reports can be relied on.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
Sources
↗ SF311 Customer Service Center — AboutOperator page: 311 founded in 2007 under Mayor Gavin Newsom, open 24 hours a day 365 days a year, answering in over 160 languages, replacing a landscape of over 50 city agencies and more than 1,000 published phone numbers. sf.gov renders client-side and returns an empty body to automated fetching; content confirmed via search.
↗ Western City Magazine — Taking Service to the Next Level With 311Second source for the March 2007 launch date and the consolidation rationale, from the League of California Cities' magazine rather than the city itself. The month is the weakest date in the entry, resting on these two sources.
↗ Open311 — AboutEstablishes the origin and stops the 'first' claim: 'Open311 first began with an API for Washington D.C.'s 311 system, but it became a community when the leadership of San Francisco and the support of organizations like OpenPlans, Code for America, and even the White House brought many cities, companies, and organizations together into a productive collaboration.'
↗ Open311 — GeoReport v2 Established and GeoReport v1 Goes Live (6 May 2010)Dates the joint specification: 'The two cities currently driving this forward the most, San Francisco and Washington D.C., have come together to agree on and fully interoperate with a new Open311 GeoReport v2 specification.' Same post records that San Francisco 'moved their API from just being available for testing to being deployed as a live, in-production web service'. The v2 spec was frozen on 11 March 2011.
↗ San Francisco 311 — Open311 GeoReport v2 endpointThe currency check, performed directly on 26 July 2026: the endpoint returned live records, the first carrying service_request_id 101004504876 and requested_datetime 2026-07-26T17:12:05Z. The companion services.json returned seven service codes, all of type 'batch'. The key-issuance host still documented by the city and by open311.org, mobile311-dev.sfgov.org, did not resolve in DNS on the same day.
↗ San Francisco 311 — Open311 API notesThe city's own thin Open311 page: points developers to the Open311 specification, gives the services.json example endpoint, states that no jurisdiction_id is required and that XML and JSON are supported.
↗ The San Francisco Standard — His complaint app is way better than 311. The city is about to kill it (26 May 2025)Source of the shutdown episode: officials told the developer on 13 May 2025 that the Open311 API would be discontinued on 12 July 2025; the city administrator's office cited maintenance cost, 'It would have to be fully rebuilt. It would be a huge lift.' Solve SF, launched 29 January 2025, was the API's sole user and had filed roughly 16,000 of the 336,500 service requests recorded in 2025 to that date, taking 44% of graffiti requests near Valencia Street and 21% of illegal-parking reports in the Richmond. The only statement that the shutdown was cancelled comes from the developer, not the city — which is why the entry claims only that the endpoint was still answering in July 2026.
↗ NBC Bay Area — Solve SF app linked to city's 311 may shut down after 5 months (May 2025)Independent confirmation of the city's stated reason: 'changes to the 311 service will make it unaffordable to staff and maintain the old API.'
↗ SF Public Works Commission — correspondence log, 22 May 2025City-side documentary trace of the episode: the commission's correspondence log records an item dated 14 May 2025, '311 shutting down API'.
↗ DataSF — 311 Cases (vw6y-z8j6)The open dataset and the licence position. Socrata metadata names the licence as the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License, PDDL 1.0 — an actual dedication instrument, not merely an absence of terms. 'Dataset contains SF311 cases created since 7/1/2008 with location information', updated nightly around 6am Pacific. Fields include requested_datetime, closed_date, updated_datetime, status_description, status_notes, agency_responsible, source and neighbourhood and supervisor-district boundaries. The impact figures were computed from this dataset by grouping calendar-2025 rows on the source field.
↗ Office of the Controller, City Services Auditor — San Francisco 311: New Technology, Stronger Departmental AccountabilityThe independent audit behind the lesson: SF311 'should improve internal controls to ensure requests are accurately addressed and to rely on information in key reports used for management decisions and shared with the public', and Call Center performance 'declined substantially from 2013 to 2015'. The PDF would not render for text extraction; these lines come from the search index of the same file and the report carries no publication date that could be confirmed, so the entry states no year for it.
↗ Hoodline — San Francisco 311 buried in nearly 800,000 complaints (January 2026)Currency: a year after the shutdown threat, the press still treats Solve SF as an active contributor to 311 volume. Its own headline total is not used here because the city's dataset gives a higher and directly checkable figure. Site blocks automated fetching; content confirmed via search and used only qualitatively.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “SF311 and its Open311 Write API” — San Francisco, United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/sf-311/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
🔗 Related projects
🇺🇸 NYC311 Service Requests & Open Data · New York City
New York's line came first in 2003 and publishes everything; San Francisco went further and let outside apps file into the queue.
🇳🇱 Signalen: Open-Source Public-Space Reporting Platform · Amsterdam
Amsterdam gave away the software so other cities run their own; San Francisco gave away the endpoint, then moved to close it in 2025.
🇺🇸 CleanStat Street Cleanliness Index · Los Angeles
Who makes the record: LA sends crews out to grade its own blocks, San Francisco lets residents' apps write straight into the queue.
🇺🇸 BOS:311 and Boston's Service-Request Record · Boston
Boston runs the same standard the other way: it publishes a target date per case but issues Open311 write keys only on approval.
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