Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems
Fraunhofer Institute for Open Communication Systems

FixMyCity

Red Rathaus in Berlin in front of TV-Tower under blue sky
© iStock / golero

At a Glance

FixMyCity, the web based citizen reporting platform by Fraunhofer FOKUS, provides a way for citizens to report issues to the responsible public authorities independent from time and place. Through the combination of FixMyCity platform features, bidirectional channels are created between citizens on the one side and public authorities on the other. FixMyCity focuses on cross device support and Social Media integration.

FixMyCity is commercially available for desktop PCs, smartphones and tablets.

About FixMyCity

Potholes, graffiti, damaged park benches and the like are problems all cities and towns are faced with. The time that passes before the appropriate authorities become aware of the damages and fix them, can often seem endless to many citizens. FixMyCity can help. It allows citizens to quickly contact the appropriate person in the local administration. Damage reports can be tagged with GPS coordinates and entered via smartphone or tablet. In addition, the citizen can find out whether anyone else has already entered an issue. The citizens thus support their governments and have a direct influence. The public authorities make their decisions on a broader basis and repair damage quickly and economically.

FixMyCity offers a visual illustration of publicly available data, makes interactions based on standard Web technologies possible and offers access through any modern browser, which increases its availability, reduces the development time and costs. Therefore, information and communication technologies become more and more popular in the private sector as well as in companies.

Features and ComponentsFixMyCity API

Smart City applications leveraging the FixMyCity API allow citizens to create, search and view reports. The API is based on proven REST principles. All data is stored and managed in a central database back-end.

Mobile Cross-Platform

AppIn order to allow as many citizens as possible to use the features of the FixMyCity platform, we provide a mobile cross-platform application with support for devices running on Apple iOS, Android, BlackBerry OS, Windows Phone 7 and others.

Management Console

The management console provides authorized individual views, categorize and modify received reports within a Web browser. Administrators can easily define roles with restricted permission levels for particular user groups, such as civil servants.

Real-Time Notification

A real-time notification component provides subscribed stakeholders with updates when reports change. This enables responsive mash-ups and particularly integration with 3rd party services. Notification mechanisms include WebHooks and HTML5 WebSockets.

Social Media Cross-Publishing

The Social Media cross-publishing components are used to publish reports on Social Media platforms, such as Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. Thereby, a much larger audience can be reached. Moreover, citizens get the chance to discuss local issues with their peers and friends. Additionally, information about report status changes gets propagated to the corresponding discussions.

Social Media Monitoring

A Social Media monitoring engine tracks and aggregates issue-related feedback in social networks and makes them accessible via an API. This reduces the risk of losing control over discussions and helps public authorities to stay in touch with citizens. Furthermore, the gathered data is used to calculate statistics for the automatic prioritization of reports.

Benefits and Areas of Application

There is a variety of possible applications for reporting platforms such as FixMyCity: They would certainly be useful in Smart City applications such as complaint management systems, whereby data could be processed in machine-readable format using application programming interfaces. The availability of official data through an appropriate portal has already been realized in line with the EU-Project OpenCities in a prototype. On the other hand, organizational approaches for the provision of data and services have to be assessed based on the demands of the public sector. The project has the long-term goal of providing a reporting platform in collaboration with partners from business and government that is adapted to the public sector, to design a reporting platform that complies with data protection requirements and to implement it as a pilot.direct, fast and easy contact to public authorities in Smart Cities.