How the 311 figures are calculated

Every figure on the scorecard comes from public requests on SeeClickFix, the system the City of Gloucester uses for service requests.

What is collected

Every public request for the City of Gloucester on SeeClickFix, from January 2024 on, is recorded once a day.
For each request: the category, the location, when it was submitted, and when it was acknowledged, closed, or reopened.
Descriptions, photos, and the names of the people who submitted requests are not collected.
Requests the city keeps private, and internal work orders, are not available to the public and are not counted.
If a request is deleted or made private after it was recorded, it is removed from the figures.

Open: Submitted and not yet acknowledged. Counted as open.
Acknowledged: A city staff member has marked the request as seen. Counted as open. Only city staff can acknowledge a request.
Closed: Marked resolved. Anyone with a SeeClickFix account, including the person who reported it, can close a request.
Archived: SeeClickFix archives closed requests automatically after 7 days, and staff can archive requests directly. Counted as closed.

Time to acknowledge: From when a request was submitted to when city staff acknowledged it. Requests that were never acknowledged are not included. Because only city staff can acknowledge, this is the most direct measure of the city's response.
Time to close: From submission to the most recent close. For a request that was reopened and closed again, the later close is used. A request archived without a recorded close time uses its archive time. Requests whose exact times have not been looked up yet use the time SeeClickFix last updated them, which matches the close time in most cases.
Median: The middle value: half of requests took less time, half took more. Medians are used instead of averages so a few very old requests do not distort the figure.
1 in 10 took longer than: The 90th percentile, showing how long the slowest requests take.
Open for: For requests still open, the time from submission to today.
Ward: The ward containing the request's map location, using the 2022 ward and precinct boundaries from MassGIS (opens in new tab). Requests placed outside the city's boundaries are listed separately.
Per 1,000 residents: Requests divided by the ward's 2020 census population, times 1,000.

Only public requests are counted. Work the city does without a SeeClickFix request is not reflected.
A closed request is not always a fixed problem. Duplicates, requests outside city responsibility, and requests closed by the reporter all count as closed.
Some departments use SeeClickFix more fully than others, which affects how their categories look.
Differences between wards reflect how often residents in each ward report problems, not only how the city responds.
Requests submitted recently have had less time to close, so figures for recent months will change.
Figures based on fewer than 5 requests are not shown.