The Needs Monitor GPT
by Fred Eberlein
It has been four months since my last blog on Jennifer Pahlka’s book, Recoding America. In the interim, I’ve been spending time in the amazing world of customized ChatGPT.
While I await Jennifer’s decision to join our board of advisors, my good friend and CTO collaborator, Egor Piskunov, and I have been building and testing the Needs Monitor GPT as defined in The 90-Degree Turn.
The citizen’s portal to government,
the government’s portal to citizens.
The Needs Monitor is being developed as a public portal for aligning individual needs with government resources. In the Needs Monitor, users register their issues — from petty local matters that have no personal impact or cost, like uncollected trash — to complex issues with a high personal impact, like financial planning.
Every issue registered in the Needs Monitor is tabulated, validated, and tracked. While most issues can be settled in hours, others are more complex and may require solicitations. Users — whether private individuals or government employees — can see an ongoing summation of concerns across the country and how those concerns are being addressed.
Through the Needs Monitor, citizens and government freely interact and collaborate to find and implement the best solutions to individual, community, and regional needs. For this reason, we refer to the Needs Monitor as the citizens’ portal to government and the government’s portal to citizens.
Governments – and particularly the one headquartered in D.C. – contain oceans of data. Until GPT came along, these oceans were too vast to explore. But with GPT, we can harvest these data to benefit every citizen while simultaneously reforming government by identifying which parts of it are needed and which are not.
In the course of developing the Needs Monitor GPT, we came across some interesting vendors serving government with similarities to the Needs Monitor concept. CivicPlus, for example, offers a wide range of paid services designed to help government function better. I see them as a kind of government CRM solution.
Unlike CivicPlus, the Needs Monitor is free to users and singularly focused on streamlining government and getting needed things done at a reasonable cost.
The Needs Monitor can also be seen as a political movement that pivots government from an institutional mindset to an operational one. In the process, we transform government’s role in society and society’s role in government.
The Needs Monitor GPT alpha version is planned for release in early May, in advance of the Code for America Summit in Oakland where I hope to demo it. Wish me luck. It’s California or Bust!
