Feeds may be somewhat guided, but it is not exactly as bad as putting data on straight HTML websites – any structured data like XML or RSS can be sliced and diced by 3rd party apps.

Government entities should open their data to the maximum extent, and if they want to build more guided, restricted interfaces to hand-hold the public at the public’s expense, they can do that, but others who do this on their own for public-interest and/or commercial reasons will likely deliver a better product (more valuable and relevant to the general public) that is not based on taxes.

See the principles of open data at the Independent Government Observers Task Force:
http://igotf.org/

Also “Government Data and the Invisible Hand” by David G. Robinson, Harlan Yu, William P. Zeller, Edward W. Felten -Yale Journal of Law and Technology (2009)
http://www.yjolt.org/files/robinson-11-YJOLT-.pdf

Abstract:
If the next Presidential administration really wants to embrace the potential of Internet-enabled government transparency, it should follow a counter-intuitive but ultimately compelling strategy: reduce the federal role in presenting important government information to citizens. Today, government bodies consider their own websites to be a higher priority than technical infrastructures that open up their data for others to use. We argue that this understanding is a mistake. It would be preferable for government to understand providing reusable data, rather than providing websites, as the core of its online publishing responsibility.

Rather than struggling, as it currently does, to design sites that meet each end-user need, we argue that the executive branch should focus on creating a simple, reliable and publicly accessible infrastructure that exposes the underlying data. Private actors, either nonprofit or commercial, are better suited to deliver government information to citizens and can constantly create and reshape the tools individuals use to find and leverage public data. The best way to ensure that the government allows private parties to compete on equal terms in the provision of government data is to require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.

Regarding the ability for the public to evaluate completion rates, don’t forget that is wanted by government administrative/budgeting offices too! Don’t underestimate how many bureaucratic divisions have resisted technology or abused it so that very little evaluative data can be had easily on their performance. It’s probably just not available in many cases, which is evidently the case in Milwaukee based on their current proposed budget and plans for a unified call center that is in large part a 311 system.

My point was the same as Sir Tim Berners-Lee ‘s in his recent TED talk–give us all the data, raw, whole and complete, now. All public information/data that’s digital should be in queryable databases so it’s structured, and then you can futz with the way output is structured forever after.

Incidentally, that neighborhood services and crime mapping application for Milwaukee was spawned because of the tedium and inefficiency of trying to watch all the individual items for a whole neighborhood and getting redundant material since the email output is based on .5 mile (max.) radii from address-based centerpoints. That particular instance of it requires 24 centerpoints to cover two strategic planning areas–a rather small part of the city. And it took hours to set that up due to the poor interface the City has for it.

What you describe could be a potential use of the live 311 feed produced by a government – sifting through to see how many duplicates they are and if it is possible evaluate completion rates.