I proposed developing something very similar to this to the Knight Foundation two years ago (along with a follow-up back end) and was turned down. But somebody built it anyway.
San Francisco Chronicle: SeeClickFix: Get things fixed in your community.
Good news for citizen engagement: SeeClickFix.com has just arrived in San Francisco.
The site, started a few months ago by four lads in New Haven, Conn., [is] using all sorts of zippy digital Web tools to solve
neighborhood problems by soliciting examples, alerting residents and
hooking them up with officials (or other residents) who can fix things. …It’s about what should be a basic newspaper mission: holding public officials accountable in their areas of responsibility. …
SeeClickFix is a mashup of Google maps,
resident-supplied and created neighborhood polygons drawn on blocks of
the city with notes about things that are bad or broken, an attachment
of contacts for responsible parties and an apparently impressive
response already in New Haven both from city officials and private
industry. You can also blog about a particular problem.Ben Berkowitz, a Web designer, founded SeeClickFix
along with Miles and Kam Lasater (formerly sons of S.F.) and Jeff
Blasius, some of them ex-Yalies. They’ve wired up New Haven so well,
according to Ben, that everyone from city managers to AT&T execs
monitor their site and see to it that complaints get addressed.What’s their goal? “Personally, I’d like to see us in 40 or 50 communities within a year,” Berkowitz says.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
Great post and an interesting proposal. There’s some connection between online social capital and the real deal locally that’ll take some time for people to get used to, at least in Wisconsin. I forwarded your post to our paper here in WI. Let you know if they pick it up. But it’s newspapers. : P