Neighbourhood problems? Try an online Fix-It.
The ever-inventive Tom Steinberg and crew at MySociety are now recruiting beta testers for their Neighbourhood Fix-It tool. If you live in the UK, you can sign up here.
Neighbourhood Fix-It is mySociety's next site. It is a simple service which allows people across the UK to report common local problems like graffiti, broken street lights, leaking pipes etc by sticking a pin in the map. What makes it different is that it will provide a public place where users can see what has been reported by other users, make comments on what's going on, and subscribe to alerts when new development occur.
Neighbouhood Fix-It has been funded by the Department for Constitutional Affairs, built by Matthew Somerville and cost £10,000. Whether this is something that will be welcomed by local councils as a neat way of aggregating complaints, or cursed as another route for residents to moan about problems we'll have to wait and see. The project's partner the Young Foundation says:
The website will allow people to do two things: to report broken infrastructure in their area to the local authority easily; and to start, or take part in public discussions about maintaining and improving the infrastructure and environment in their neighbourhoods. The pilot will involve working with two local authority partners to develop, test and launch the Neighbourhood Fix-It website in their areas.
It's not clear yet what happens to those of us reporting problems outside the pilot areas, but hey, it's easy to join in and we'll find out after the March deadline for tester sign-up.
Meanwhile, if you wish to raise issues at a national level, the MySociety E-petitions site at 10 Downing Street bubbles on. The top petition is currently Scrap the planned vehicle tracking and road pricing policy (638134 signatures), followed by Repeal the Hunting Act 2004 (22176 signatures).
On the news last night the government were saying they were suprised at the level of reponses to e-petitions! Perhaps after all these years they will listen to the voices out here.... very important e-petition to signup to and circulate round as widely as psossib le is "Defend Funding" - stop money from the lottery going to prop up the Olympics. Signup at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Defend-funding/
Posted by: Paul Webster | February 11, 2007 at 07:57 PM