Cities fix thousands of things a year that nobody notices. A pothole filled before it ruins a tire. A streetlight back on before anyone trips. The work is real, but it's invisible, and that makes it easy for residents to believe nothing gets done.
Sentra 311's public performance page makes the work visible. A city can turn it on in the portal, and it appears at the city's report address as "Work we've done."
What residents see
The page shows the period the city chooses: the last 30, 90 or 365 days.
- Big numbers. Requests fixed, typical days to fix, percent fixed on time, requests received and the average resident rating.
- A month-by-month trend, with a table version for screen readers.
- Recently fixed, a gallery of before and after photos.
- A map of fixes, with dots grouped into areas about 100 meters across.
- By request type: how many were fixed and how long they typically took.
- By council district, when the city has districts set up.
- How we measure: a plain explanation of what each number means.
The page is in English and Spanish, and it links back to the report form: "See a problem? Report it."
What it never shows
We built the page to show work, not people:
- No names, emails or phone numbers.
- No house numbers. Addresses show the street only, like "N Blackstone Ave."
- No exact locations. Map points are rounded to areas about 100 meters across.
- No restricted departments. Departments the city marks as restricted are always left out.
- No inflated numbers. Referred requests and merged duplicates don't count as fixed.
Cities can also leave out specific departments or request types entirely.
Photos, with a say for staff
Before and after photos are the most persuasive part of the page. They're also where care matters most. A photo might show a resident's car, their front door or a person walking by.
Staff control which photos appear. Each before and after photo on a request page has an "On public page / Hidden" switch, and there's a "Hide all" button for sensitive locations. Cities choose one of two modes:
- All, unless staff hide one. Photos appear unless someone switches them off.
- Only ones staff approve. Nothing appears until someone switches a photo on.
Changes show on the public page right away. The resident who filed still sees their own photos on their tracking link either way.
Put it on your website
The page has a compact version that cities can embed on their own website with a short code from the portal. It shows the headline numbers and the trend, with a link to the full page.
Why publish it
There are three good reasons:
- It answers "does the city do anything?" with evidence instead of argument.
- It shows residents that reporting works, which brings in more reports from parts of town that report less.
- It keeps the numbers honest. When the numbers are public, the city cares about measuring them correctly.
Some cities worry that publishing a slow month will cause problems. In practice, residents are more forgiving of an honest slow month than of silence. The "How we measure" section helps, because it explains what "on time" means and why some requests take longer.
How the numbers are calculated
The page explains its own numbers, but here's the short version:
- Fixed counts requests resolved in the period, not counting referrals to other agencies or merged duplicates.
- Typical days to fix is the median, the middle value, so one very long job doesn't distort it.
- On time is the share of fixed requests resolved before their due date, using the city's own targets and business hours.
- Resident rating averages the ratings residents gave after a fix.
The numbers refresh at least every 10 minutes, and right away when staff change which photos are public.
Who it's for
Residents are the main audience, but council members and the press use it too. A single public page with clear definitions saves staff from answering the same "how is the city doing?" question in different ways, with different numbers, for different people.
Turning it on
In the portal, go to Admin › Public performance. Choose the period, the sections to show, whether to show photos and which mode, and anything to leave out. Preview it, then publish. You can unpublish at any time.