How the 311 numbers work

Everything comes from the 311 requests City of Somerville publishes on its open data portal, data.somervillema.gov (opens in new tab).

What's collected

Every request since January 2025, checked daily.
Service requests only: calls for information and feedback aren't counted.
For each one: category, type, ward, when it was submitted, and its latest status and when it was set.
The city's data has no address, map location, or time a request was acknowledged, so this site has no maps, repeat locations, or time to acknowledge.
Not collected: descriptions or who submitted it.

Each request has the status the city last gave it. A request whose status is Closed counts as closed; any other status counts as open.

Time to close: Submission to the date of the request's closed status. Requests still open are left out, so the typical time to close is for closed requests only.
No update in over a year: An open request whose status hasn't changed in more than a year. Some may have been fixed and never closed; others may never have been handled. The data doesn't show which. They still count as open.
Typical (median): Half took less time, half took more. Unlike an average, a few very old requests don't skew it.
1 in 10 took over: The 90th percentile: how long the slowest requests take.
Ward: As the city records it with each request. Requests with no ward recorded count in the city's totals, not in any ward's.
Per 1,000 residents: Requests divided by the ward's 2020 census population, times 1,000. Ward populations come from the census, so they differ slightly from the state's newer citywide estimate used on the budget page.

A closed request isn't always a fixed problem. Duplicates and requests outside the city's responsibility also get closed.
Ward differences reflect how often people report problems, not only how the city responds.
Recent months will change as requests close.
Numbers based on fewer than 5 requests aren't shown.

Data from City of Somerville's open data portal, data.somervillema.gov (opens in new tab), used under the ODbL (opens in new tab) license. The data and code are in the public repository (opens in new tab).