The bin that had been overflowing for three days

1. The scene

   Tuesday morning at the public spaces department of a mid-sized council. A council officer opens her inbox: forty reports, four meetings, and the cleaning budget that has to be closed this week. In a neighbourhood at the far north end, a bin has been overflowing since Saturday: bags around it, flattened cardboard leaning against it, a mattress. Nobody from the department has been past, because the collection route does not come round until Thursday.

2. Where it breaks

   The council has more than four thousand cameras. Nobody watches them: there is no control room with four thousand screens, and there never will be. They are there so you can look back at what happened, not to tell you what is happening now. So the neighbourhood finds out before the council does.

3. What happens

   On Tuesday at half past ten, someone posts a photo of the bin. By eleven, the photo has two hundred comments and the name of the neighbourhood on it. At quarter past eleven, the officer learns about a three-day-old problem from a social network. There has been a camera pointing at that bin since day one.

4. With IRIS

   IRIS watches that camera just like the other four thousand, all at once. Operations writes the rule down once — if the bin has been overflowing for more than two hours, tell me — and IRIS applies it without anyone having to think about it again. On Saturday afternoon, the officer would have got a picture, the street and the time. A truck goes past on Sunday morning, and on Monday there is nothing to post. The decision is still hers: what IRIS saves her is finding out late.

A city does not need more cameras. It needs the ones it already has to know when to speak up.