Civic participation that allows the active involvement of citizens in managing their street or neighbourhood.

Type of content: Assets
Type of asset:
Use case
Data source
Big data potential
No
Policy domains: Urban Planning & Transport
Phase in the policy cycle:
Policy Implementation
Open license availability
No
Ease of use
High
Tags: Smart City Smart Government Citizen-centred policy-making
Addresses:
SWOT Analysis for
Fix My Street
Helpful Harmful
Internal
Strengths• User friendly Interface: Report a problem by entering a nearby UK postcode, or street name and area, locating the problem on a map of the area and entering details of the problem
• Map based website and app that helping people in the United Kingdom inform their local authority of problems needing their attention, such as potholes, broken streetlamps, etc.
• Reports are published on the site
• Matches users’ postcodes and the category of their problem to the correct local authority. No need for the user to know which authority is responsible for a specific type of problem in a specific location.
• Monitoring tools: citizens can track and discuss the performance of their governments in response to the overall state of their environments
• Democratizing an otherwise bureaucratic process
Weaknesses• Inclusion of people from different sociodemographic backgrounds: Access and use of these platforms, in particular, might be difficult for marginalized groups in society as it requires skills and aptitude that are often out of their reach
• The cost of the equipment to access the platforms (e.g. smartphones, tablets, or computers) is a potential factor promoting exclusion.
• Need to better understand the degree of sociodemographic inequality on platforms.
• No user authentication
External
Opportunities• Recent advances in crowd-based production technologies and other associated methods have triggered numerous crowdsourcing initiatives for a wide range of government, civic, and commercially oriented causes.
• Web-based platforms that crowdsource civic participation for urban governance have become increasingly prominent in recent years
• Promoting civic engagement: citizens can track and discuss the performance of their governments in response to the overall state of their environments
• Public service improvement
• Promote accountability
• Democratizing bureaucratic processes
Threats• Marginalizing certain groups of the population
• The cost of the equipment to access the platforms (e.g. smartphones, tablets, or computers) is a potential factor promoting exclusion.

Comments

Would definitely use such a tool for my neighborhood, it is really useful to have the opportunity to speed up or even bypass bureaucratic and time consuming processes with smart solutions.

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