In late February, New Orleans tech entrepreneur and philanthropist Matt Wisdom celebrated a major milestone: He and a team of colleagues stuck a small plastic sign on top of a traffic cone in Gentilly. The newspaper sent a reporter.
On the sign was a QR code. When scanned, it would provide a link to a web page providing status updates on the city’s progress towards fixing the pothole under the cone. This was the culmination of what Wisdom described as months of work. But it was also the first step of his long-brewing vision for addressing the city’s beleaguered roads.
“The problem in our city is not that we’re too high tech,” Wisdom told Verite News. “It’s that we don’t have enough technology in infrastructure.”
Under the auspices of his charitable group, the Wisdom Foundation, and a newly created for-profit company called Civilized.ai, Wisdom and his team had been working for months with the city to integrate “newer technologies” with the city’s infrastructure. To do that, he planned to work with the city’s existing database of 311 requests.
In late 2023, he rolled out FixNOLA, a website that catalogues and gamifies the city’s 311 data regarding road and drainage issues, creating a leaderboard to keep track of top “fixers,” a mix of contractors and volunteers who provide photographs and updates to existing 311 requests. Then, in February of this year, Wisdom launched ChatNOLA, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence that can help log 311 requests as well as provide updates on already submitted requests while communicating in a human-like manner.
Behind the scenes, Wisdom and his nonprofit have rankled some city staffers, who noted that Wisdom is doing this work without a formal agreement with the city government. They are also concerned about whether Wisdom’s team is getting access to the personal information, such as phone numbers and home addresses, that residents enter into the city’s 311 system when they make a complaint.
Five city employees familiar with 311 systems and protocols told Verite News that they are concerned that Wisdom, who has no background in public service administration, is creating a parallel 311 system when the city is in the process of implementing an already purchased new system for processing 311 data. (The employees declined to be identified publicly for fear of retaliation.)
The city already publishes 311 complaints on a public-facing database. But it scrubs the data of personal information, such as the complainants’ names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses.
Neither the Wisdom Foundation nor Civilized.ai has any contract or agreement with the city outlining the terms of this work or setting limits on how it can use the personal data it collects. (Both FixNOLA and ChatNOLA have privacy policies on their websites.)
While Wisdom freely admits there is no contract, he did say that he sent the city a “letter of intent” for his work, and he contests that any of the data sharing is out of the ordinary.
“This is a pilot project right now,” Wisdom said. “There is no money being exchanged with the city, and there is no legal contract. This is comparable to other cities focused on innovation like Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco that provide access to their 311 API and data after they review your ideas.”
Wisdom, a tech entrepreneur who sold his company, Turbosquid, for $75 million in 2021, said the partnership with Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration started after a meeting with Cantrell’s top deputy, Chief Administrative Officer Gilbert Montaño, where they discussed Wisdom’s idea that QR codes at potholes could provide real-time updates for residents. Montaño was apparently enthused about the idea.
“So then Gilbert started introducing me to people in the city,” Wisdom said, noting that he met with employees of the Department of Public Works and the Orleans Parish Communication District. “It was really helpful to try and unravel what was inside our 311 system. Like, what is the data? How did it get there? It’s extraordinarily complex.”
Wisdom offered his technology and services free of charge to the city through the Wisdom Foundation. But his eventual goal, he said, is to refine his software so that he can sell similar technology to other cities through Civilized.ai.
The city did not respond to a request for comment. Montaño previously told The Times-Picayune that the law department had been involved and that Wisdom is “not inside the government with keys to the file cabinets.”
It appears that Wisdom’s team — or at least, its software — had access at one point to the personal contact information of those who submitted 311 requests.
In early February, a Verite News employee received an email from FixNOLA after reporting a pothole through the city’s existing 311 system. Verite News also confirmed a separate instance of a text someone else received from FixNOLA after reporting an issue through 311.
Wisdom said the email and text notifications were a temporary bug. He and city officials had discussed a feature that would automatically email or text residents updates on their 311 requests, but had decided not to launch the feature. Despite that, he said, an error in the software sent out those email and text notices anyway. Wisdom said that once he was notified of the issue, he fixed the error. (A recent 311 request by Verite News did not immediately generate a reply from FixNOLA.)
“ChatNOLA is committed to protecting the privacy of citizens’ data,” Wisdom said. The company, he said, installed a firewall in ChatNOLA that segregates personal information. “It doesn’t download personal info. If a citizen asks ChatNOLA to search for their service requests using their phone number or email, they are sent a 6 digit code to their device. After they provide the code, the public portion of the service request is downloaded, without personal info, and shared with them.”
He did not, however, respond to questions about FixNOLA’s previous access to personal data entered into the city’s 311 system. Instead, as this article was nearing publication, Wisdom told Verite News that he has retired FixNOLA, disconnecting it from 311.
While some 311 data is publicly available on the city’s website, the city excludes personal contact information from the dataset. And the city’s website reads: “The City does not rent or sell personally identifiable information (i.e., information such as name, address, phone number, e-mail, etc., that identifies a user as a particular person), nor would the City exchange or trade such information with third-parties without a user’s explicit permission.”
But he declined to explain how his software had access to the data in the first place, and he evaded questions about whether it still has that access.
City employees were especially frustrated that Wisdom was able to gain an audience with city leadership and get the go-ahead to work on new 311 tools sans contract.
The Cantrell administration has previously found itself in hot water over its zeal for “high tech” solutions. In 2021, Cantrell announced a “smart cities” initiative that would create a city-directed internet service to expand internet access across the city. But an investigation later found evidence of bid-rigging. The city employees who were most closely involved have denied any wrongdoing and have not faced either criminal or administrative charges.
Wisdom has not received any money from the city for his 311 work.
Since 2016, Wisdom has contributed $20,000 to Cantrell’s political campaigns and an additional $5,000 to Action New Orleans, her tourism-focused political action committee. Wisdom also served as co-chair of Cantrell’s 2018 transition team after she was first elected mayor. (He had previously served on former Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s transition team.)
“I started working on the city’s technology in 2010 as the co-chair for Mitch Landrieu’s Tech Transition team, and I have spent countless hours through the years since helping the city without compensation,” Wisdom said in a Friday (March 28) text message. “I attribute the willingness to work with me to my experience, the quality of the ideas, and my ability to do it for $0 — in the past, present, and future. Helping the city is a labor of love, and I’m in an extraordinarily lucky position to donate time and resources to move New Orleans forward.”
One city, two 311 chatbots
Some city employees also question whether FixNOLA or ChatNOLA are even useful tools for the city’s 311 system.
Residents can already report non-emergency issues to 311 through three different avenues: They can call 311 during business hours, they can submit a request through the city’s 311 website, or they can “chat” with a chatbot called Jazz through text or on the website. After submitting a request, a resident might receive a request number that they can then use to check for updates.
ChatNOLA, Wisdom’s service for intaking new requests, does not exist on a city-owned website and offers residents a fourth tool to make 311 requests. One employee cautioned that creating yet another avenue for 311 intake, especially one that resembled the existing chatbot process, could confuse residents about which one they should use.
But Wisdom says that ChatNOLA, which uses artificial intelligence, is more advanced than the city’s Jazz chatbot, which was first launched in 2021.
“The AI that we have now is a thousand times better than the AI we had,” Wisdom said.
Matthew Young, an expert on public sector innovation implementation who has studied 311 systems, cautioned against falling for the glossy veneer of new technologies as an answer to longstanding problems.
He pointed to San Francisco, which in 2009 incorporated Twitter as an avenue for submitting 311 reports. The move came after then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom met with executives from Twitter. While Twitter did increase the number of 311 requests, complaints submitted via Twitter were often vague, requiring city workers to clarify, modify and re-log them.
Young is skeptical about Wisdom’s tools.
“There’s nothing involved in making [Turbosquid] that tells me anything about this person’s capability to solve complex service delivery optimization problems for a city government,” Young said, noting that most cities already know where their infrastructural issues are.
Young noted that there are already applications and software available that have successfully made municipal complaint lines more efficient. He pointed to Open311, an open-source application developed with input from multiple governments, as an exemplar. Young said that cities should use applications that have already been shown to minimize back-end work and increase access for low-income communities.
“Anyone walking in and just saying we’re going to use AI to streamline the operational side of 311, I’m not going to believe it till I see it,” Young said.
Wisdom has insisted that artificial intelligence is an important tool in processing “very complicated” 311 data. But Young’s not convinced.
“You don’t need AI. This data is simple,” Young said.
City departments are supposed to resolve 311 requests, which they receive by email through the system, quickly.
But duplicate requests and 311 calls that lack sufficient information, like where the problem is located, can slow things down. In recent years, city understaffing and payment delays to contractors have also dragged out wait times for pothole patches and streetlight repairs.
Wisdom said that the current lack of transparent and clear communication around 311 requests creates a host of issues.
He offered an example of the ways the current system falls short: If a resident submits a complaint about a pothole, but the street is already scheduled for resurfacing, the city will mark the complaint as “resolved,” Wisdom said. But the pothole is still there, and the complainant may not know about the construction plans.
Wisdom said he hopes that both FixNOLA and ChatNOLA will provide better transparency and communication about the status of current road and drainage issues, as well as pending construction projects.
“What we’re offering is an experience with the most modern technology in the world that, frankly, is not available,” Wisdom said. “And so I think that moves us forward. I think the city of New Orleans needs AI and needs access to try and actually use the cutting-edge tools to move into that age and so, you know, the citizens can report stuff a couple of different ways. I think ours is the best, but I’m biased.”
The Orleans Parish Communication District, however, is already in the process of switching to a new cloud-based system that will better log and track 311 requests, as Cantrell’s office announced last year.
The system, along with an accompanying app, should remedy many of the current issues with the city’s 311 system, according to OPCD, which runs 311 and 911. For instance, it will allow people to more accurately geolocate their request. It should also allow the city to publish a publicly accessible map of certain infrastructure issues, so residents can see whether road and infrastructure issues have already been reported. The app will allow for follow-up communication with residents to clarify requests. And it also should have a more sophisticated chat flow that can communicate more cogently.
According to the mayor’s announcement, the system is expected to go online later this year, and the app should launch next year.
Even so, Wisdom said that the improvements will not render ChatNOLA redundant. Rather, he said, it will continue to give the city better access to information about its residents’ needs.
“Who would argue that the city needs less information?” Wisdom said. “Less ways to help you with your issues? Less brainpower trying to move us forward?”