D.C.’s Broken 311 App Has Sparked a Debate Over Government, Tech and AI

Kyle Fiducia admits that he spends plenty of time recording the petty annoyances of city living: the rats, the illegal dumping and uncollected trash, the sidewalks near his D.C. home littered with electric scooters. His tool of choice was often D.C.’s official 311 app, which allows residents to report a multitude of municipal irritations to the city agencies that are responsible for addressing them.

But earlier this year it was the 311 app that became Fiducia’s primary irritation. First it was buggy and slow, and then at some point in May, it just stopped working altogether. Fiducia could have complained about the app or just given up, but he chose a different path: He created his own.

“I’ve long wanted a better 311 app,” he said. “I just have never been so motivated to do it as to take my own time and do it.”

A software developer by trade, Fiducia said it took him just a few hours — with an assist from AI — to produce Snap311, his renegade alternative. He said it offers “fast, photo-first flow, drafts that save and send themselves when you’re offline or when DC 311’s own system is down, real tracking once a report is filed, and a simple [user interface] that doesn’t fight you.”

But a fight is coming from D.C. itself. City officials have asked Fiducia to sever his app’s connection to its 311 system, saying they worry it could expose residents’ personal information or inspire other apps that pretend to offer city services but instead seek to do harm.

“We have no security oversight of third-party applications that are unauthorized,” Stephen Miller, D.C.’s chief technology officer, told the D.C. Council last week.

Fiducia said his app doesn’t share any personal information, and that he has no plans to take it down. In fact, he said the app should be available to all users on the Apple store soon. (It was initially released in beta mode, allowing a few dozen people to put it through its paces and offer him feedback.) To him, the dispute is evidence of a government that isn’t willing to accept outside help — even if it results in services that are more responsive, more nimble and cheaper.

“The region has very smart technologists,” he says. “If they can’t afford to hire them, they should at least be willing to listen to them rather than stonewalling them and saying, ‘Not only do we not your input, but we want you to take down your contribution.’”

Civic-minded technologists and hackers using their skills to improve local government isn’t exactly new. It was more than a decade ago that civic hacking burst into the open, fueled largely by organizations like Code for America and its local chapters, and Code for D.C., which hosted hackathons and agitated for the city’s government to make public more of the data it collects. The efforts paid off, in part — Mayor Muriel Bowser hosted a hackathon alongside Code for D.C. to “develop innovative solutions to D.C. transportation challenges,” and the city started developing what is now a robust open data portal.

“A lot of people come in with different reasons, but they want to help the community and put their skills to good use,” says Helen Glover, a director of Civic Tech D.C., the successor to Code for D.C. The group’s current projects include an effort to rate every D.C. street for cyclist safety, a real-time map of water quality ratings of local rivers and waterways, and a platform to more easily connect residents returning from prison with housing.

Josh Jacobson, a tech consultant and Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner in Ward 1, has been pursuing his own projects, including a data visualization of the D.C. budget, a real-time tracker of whether public pools are open or not, and a map showing average rents for almost 200,000 housing units across the city.

Miller said the D.C. government is still open to these types of outside initiatives. “We welcome civic development with our open data. We think it’s important that civic developers take time to create dashboards to hold us accountable, to create transparency in the government,” he said.

But Jacobson said D.C. has deeper problems with many of its public-facing apps and online services. The annual online lottery for access to summer camps run by the Department of Parks and Recreation has often crashed because of heavy demand, and the city’s snowplow tracker showed inaccurate information during the January snowstorm and was later taken offline.

Jacobson said the recent outage of the city’s 311 app — which is maintained by consulting firm Accenture under a $500,000 annual contract — was the clearest example of something being wrong.

“I was surprised at the two-week mark, and shocked at the six-week mark,” he said. “If the company I worked for broke something for two weeks, my customers wouldn’t find it acceptable.”

(Miller said a bug also affected other cities’ 311 apps that are maintained by Accenture.)

Fiducia — who was encouraged by Jacobson to build Snap311 — said addressing all of these problems is even easier in the era of AI, which can now take simple commands and produce code that in the past could only be written by experienced engineers. “Anyone who isn’t leveraging AI in this era is missing a huge opportunity,” he said.

That’s what Rini Sampath did during her unsuccessful run for D.C. mayor this year, where her platform focused on delivering better government services. Using the publicly accessible platform Lovable, Sampath and her team built their own renegade 311 app.

“This isn’t some technological feat,” she said.

The impacts, though, could be far-reaching. In 2025, there were 81,830 311 requests filed through the city’s app, though Sampath and others say the number could have been higher if the app was more reliable. (Most people still call 311 to request government services; there were 536,762 calls in 2025.)

“I think the city needs to encourage this model of civic participation, because if we want to become this world-class city, a city that’s in the 21st century, we need to get the brightest minds in D.C. to be involved,” Sampath said.

D.C. officials aren’t yet going that far, but they say they are willing to talk about what’s working and what’s not with the official 311 app.

“We’re going to host some listening sessions, because we want to understand how people want the app to work better,” said Heather McGaffin, director of the D.C. Office of Unified Communications, which fields all emergency and non-emergency calls and requests for service. “We really want to hear from our community, what residents need and want. We want to hear what’s drawing people to use [Fiducia’s] app instead of a city app.”

Fiducia, though, isn’t convinced. “If they wanted to have open dialogue, they’ve made no efforts to do that. I’ve received no emails from them,” he said. “Basically we’re in the dark here. From my perspective, it just feels like they’re playing cover-your-ass because we’ve stirred up attention around this.”

Looking forward, Fiducia said he wants to keep improving his own 311 app. Jacobson is already an avid user — and doesn’t see that changing.

“It’s three times faster,” he said, “meaning I end up submitting more requests than I would otherwise.”