Bottom Of The Barrel

The power of the citizen technologist

Imagine a world where every citizen feels empowered and part of their neighborhood. Imagine if everyone trusted and felt taken care of by their local government. That is the idea behind SeeClickFix, who is leveraging the power of the internet to bring citizen and hard-working local authorities and service people closer together.

Here is an example of their service hard at work. Ass you can see many people have reported pothole problems in and around Boston. If you zoom out of the google map you can see the reports go clear across the entire country.

SeeClickFix encourages residents to become citizens by participating in taking care of and improving their neighborhoods. We allow anyone to:

• See - see a non-emergency issue in your neighborhood
• Click - open a ticket describing the issue and what can be done to resolve it
• Fix - publicly report the issue to everyone for resolution
  

They also believe in the power of technology to promote:

• Transparency - governments and most organizations work best when they conduct their business in plain view. We'll do our best to do the same.
• Collaboration - Four brains are better than one. And millions of brains are better than three. Our goal is to give everyone else the tools to accomplish what we never could ourselves. Open source software and wikis are good models for us.
• Scale - We could have created a site that focused on our home town. Using the internet and all the tools others have created, we want to reach as many people as possible around the globe. Massive scale, please.
• Efficiency - Although paper has its place, there is a lot more room for the web and the mobile phone. Rather than re-invent the wheel, our site is built on open source software and Google maps.

So go out into your neighborhood and if you See a problem, get back online and Click the map and help your local government Fix our issues.

Labels: Technology

posted by TheWino @ 10:11 AM