DC 311 and the Open311 API It Started
Washington introduced a 311 line in 2000 and has run it through the Office of Unified Communications since 2004, moving the case system onto a cloud platform in 2018. Open311 says its standard began as an API for D.C.'s 311, and by May 2010 D.C. and San Francisco were the two cities agreeing the GeoReport v2 specification together. The District now publishes every request as annual files back to 2009, plus a rolling last-90-days layer. But the Open311 endpoint still listed for D.C. no longer answers — it timed out on 26 July 2026, while San Francisco's keeps serving records.
Live
📅 since 2000
✔ Editor-reviewed
📊 Impact
440,600 service requests in calendar 2025, counted directly from the District's own published service-request layer on 26 July 2026.
🎓 Lesson
Writing a standard is not the same as keeping it. The interface D.C. authored has gone dark while the city that joined it later still serves one, and D.C.'s published record cannot answer the questions asked of it: it carries a due date and a resolution date but no field for the channel a request arrived through, and no independent audit has ever checked whether a case marked closed was actually fixed.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
FundingDistrict of Columbia appropriations, through the Office of Unified Communications
Sources
↗ OUC — About 311 (operator)Operator page for the running service: 'Call DC 311 at 311 24 hours a day, 7 days a week', open '24 hours a day, 365 days a year', with texting to 32311, @311DCGov, an online portal at 311.dc.gov, a mobile app and live chat 8AM-5:15PM. The page carries no launch date and no volume figures, which is why neither is sourced here.
↗ OUC — History of OUCEstablishes the operating agency and its date: 'On October 1, 2004, management of the PSCC changed from a joint operation of the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and Fire and Emergency Medical Services (FEMS) departments to the Office of Unified Communications (OUC)', whose 'responsibilities include all 911 and 311 call-taking, as well as police, fire, and medical dispatch'. The Unified Communications Center opened September 2006 and 'includes 911 and 311 services'. No earlier 311 launch date is given.
↗ TheDCLine.org — DC shifts to 311 for non-emergency police calls (31 January 2019)The only source found that dates the launch: 'DC's 311 line was introduced in 2000', at first 'used exclusively for reporting non-emergencies requiring a police response', with 202-727-1000 handling other services. Also records the 2008 Fenty-era redirect of police calls back to 911, the 2012 911 Purity Amendment Act, and the January 2019 return of non-emergency police calls to 311, plus 1.5 million 911 calls in 2018 of which about a fifth were non-emergencies. yearStart 2000 rests on this single press source and is the weakest field in the entry.
↗ OUC — Washington, DC Modernizes its 311 System on Salesforce (23 October 2018)Dates the 2018 platform change and gives the operator's own scale figures: the District replaced its 'server-based 311 system' with a cloud platform, handling '1.8 million calls per year' and 'more than 120 types of service channels'. The same release claims call wait times fell 'from an average of seven minutes to 31 seconds'; that figure is deliberately not used in the entry, being an unaudited claim in a vendor-partnered announcement.
↗ Open311 — AboutThe origin statement the entry attributes rather than asserts: '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.' Direct fetch of this page returned the page furniture without that paragraph; the sentence was confirmed via search, the same handling this desk gave it in the sf-311 entry.
↗ Open311 — GeoReport v2 Established and GeoReport v1 Goes Live (6 May 2010)Fetched directly and the strongest support for D.C.'s authorship claim: '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.' The post also records that D.C. was accepting API key requests at api.dc.gov/key.
↗ Open311 — NYC, Boston, and D.C. Make Strides to Improve 311 Services (July 2009)Places D.C.'s API before the shared standard: by July 2009 the District had 'released a draft for the second version of it's Open 311 API', with draft documentation hosted at octolabs.pbworks.com and the Apps for Democracy contest closing that month. A first version therefore existed before GeoReport v1 went live in May 2010.
↗ Open311 wiki — Washington D.C.The community's own record of what D.C.'s API did: 'Metadata services to provide list of types of requests handled by 311', 'Structured service request data', 'Asynchronous submission — on submission of new ticket, API returns temporary token' and 'Anonymous submission'. Notes the District 'Ran apps for democracy contest in Spring 09' and later migrated between CRM systems.
↗ Open311 wiki — GeoReport v2 Servers (the registry entry that no longer resolves)The endpoint still published for the District: 'http://app.311.dc.gov/cwi/Open311/v2/services.xml', jurisdiction id 'dc.gov', XML only, listed among the official gov-domain endpoints. The currency check, run on 26 July 2026: both that URL and .../v2/requests.xml returned HTTP 522 with Retry-After 120, twice. No source found anywhere announces a retirement or a replacement endpoint, so the entry reports the measurement and not a cause. status.open311.org/cities/dc is not usable as counter-evidence: the D.C. requests it shows are seeded dummy records titled 'Shoes & Beauty' and 'Sports & Outdoors'.
↗ DCGIS — ServiceRequests MapServer (the open data itself)Establishes the shape of the archive and the source of the impact figure. The service carries one layer per calendar year from 'All Service Requests — 2009' to 'All Service Requests — 2026', plus 'Last 90 Days', 'Snow' and 'Current Fiscal Year' — annual snapshots with a rolling recent layer, not a single live feed. Layer 18 identifies itself as 'All Service Requests — 2025'; a returnCountOnly query on 26 July 2026 returned {'count':440600}. Its fields are SERVICEREQUESTID, SERVICECODE, SERVICECODEDESCRIPTION, ORGANIZATIONACRONYM, ADDDATE, RESOLUTIONDATE, SERVICEDUEDATE, SERVICEORDERSTATUS, INSPECTIONFLAG, INSPECTIONDATE, PRIORITY, WARD and coordinates — a due date and a resolution date, but no attribute recording which channel a request arrived through.
↗ DC.gov — Terms and Conditions of Use for District Data (licence position)The District's own instrument, and the one that governs: 'Unless otherwise noted, the data on the Sites is public domain and made available with a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal dedication', waiving rights worldwide including for commercial use 'all without asking permission'. Credit is requested, not required: 'While not required, we ask that you give proper credit when using data from the Sites in your own work.' District logos are carved out. The District’s catalogue metadata does not consistently match this instrument — that discrepancy is documented in the atlas entry on D.C.’s open data programme.
↗ data.gov — 311 City Service Requests in 2026 (the conflicting licence label)The harvested federal catalogue record contradicts the District's own terms: its license field reads 'https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0', an attribution licence, where D.C.'s portal terms dedicate the same data to the public domain under CC0. Publisher is the Office of Unified Communications; last modified 21 July 2026. Description: 'Requests are received by the Office of Unified Communications (OUC) through the Mayor's Call Center (311), citizens web intake at 311.dc.gov, electronic and US mail service or via other methods of communication.'
↗ OCTO — DC 311 MappingThe public-facing live view: the tool 'allows the public to see 311 service requests by location, date (2 days, 7 days and 30 days) and status', with data 'automatically accessed and updated every hour Monday to Sunday'. No Open311 or API reference appears anywhere on the page.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “DC 311 and the Open311 API It Started” — Washington D.C., United States. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/washington-dc-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
🇺🇸 Miami 311: A County Line and a City Record That Stops in 2024 · Miami
Miami-Dade wrote Open311 server code too, and its repository is a 404; the city publishes an extract that stops in August 2024.
🇨🇦 311 Toronto: Service Requests, Open Data and Service Standards · Toronto
Toronto's Open311 endpoint is dead too — 404 rather than a timeout — while its yearly request files go back to 2010.
🇨🇦 Montreal 311: one number, nineteen boroughs · Montreal
The fourth dead endpoint: Montreal is not even in the Open311 registry, and the host that would serve it does not resolve.
🇨🇴 Bogotá te escucha: one petitions system, with a statutory clock · Bogotá
Bogotá never built a 311 API, but its right of petition carries a statutory clock: 15 days, or a disciplinary matter.
→ Open this project in the interactive atlas · → 🏛️ Governance category · 🚩 Report an error