An Italian Case Study: Fatequalcosa.it

Despite being home to the beautiful La Fiorita festival, one man still believes the authorities could do more to fix street problems in his part of Italy. Platforms existed in Venice and across other regions of Italy, so a precedent was set.

Thanks to local Claudio Carletti, the La Marche region will soon get its very own FixMyStreet platform, fatequalcosa.it, which translates as Do Something! Claudio has shared his experience of using the mySociety code and his plans for the site.

The beginning

“I heard about FixMyStreet [after] reading a book called Wikicrazia where the author talked several times about mysociety.org,” Claudio explains. After exploring the mySociety sites he came across a blog post offering free developer time to help people start their freedom of information or street problem reporting projects. “I contacted [mySociety] and told them I wanted to create fixmystreet in Italy, and asked them for help. They responded immediately.”

Why FixMyStreet?

Claudio explains, “I chose this platform after trying fixmystreet.com and discovering a really well done service and a user friendly site experience.” He tells us there is already an Italian site running a similar service aimed at councils: decorourbano.org. So Claudio’s plan is to target his site at the Italian youth, 14 to 18 year olds. “I think only a cultural revolution that uses concrete tools (like FixMyStreet) can really change the way you think and act, but I think [it’s] mainly young people who must have the tools to do so.” Plus, he tells us, the youth of today will be the older generation of tomorrow.

Installation

After an initial Skype chat with mySociety’s international team Claudio felt confident enough to try a basic install of the software himself.

“I’m not a website developer but I could do it,” Claudio explains. “My experience was using the installation through the Amazon web service. So most of the work was already done and I just ran the installation following the tutorial.”

That’s not to say it was all plain sailing. “Most of my issues came from the Ubuntu terminal commands, which I didn’t know how to use. After the release of the 1.2 platform version most of my problems were resolved. One important improvement was the automatic email service set up and the MAPIT_ID_WHITELIST feature.”

But the mailing list service run by mySociety to help self-installs was an invaluable tool for solving these problems. “Matthew [lead developer for FixMyStreet] always wrote back to my emails, spending a lot time helping me understand the problems,” Claudio says.

Customisation

One of the perks of the FixMyStreet code is that it’s quite simple to change basic design elements of the site, such as colours and logos, so it can look unique from other installations. Claudio tells us, “After understanding the conf/general.yml file everything went smoothly.”

Launch plans 

Claudio has recently begun collaborating with another user on this service, and is presenting his idea to the Projetto Kublai platform where he hopes to gain more support through their community. He’ll also be taking the project to a EU meeting in Berlin in the hopes that there might be some funding there. The launch date isn’t set but he has plans for collaboration with local schools and youth organisations. “[The youth] are more familiar with smartphones and they spend more time living in the city’s streets, because they take the bus or walk or cycle, but they don’t use cars.” And Claudio envisions these will be his superusers.

Moving forward

As Claudio tells the community on Projetto Kublai, “If you look at this site http://www.emptyhomes.com you understand how in reality there are no limits to the possibilities of use of the platform.” Other instances in other countries have reported any number of different types of problems. And it doesn’t just have to be email based, FixMyBarangey in the Philippines allows users to report issues using SMS.

The bigger picture behind Claudio’s installation, he tells us, is this: “Let’s say that the platform fixmystreet is a good starting point, because it works and is easy to install and use. I’d like to have the opportunity not only to bring a problem to solve; for example organizing task forces where people will agree to go and clean up an area filled with concrete waste or to sort out a pitch in order to organize a [football] tournament. This will be the site that will give the tips (video tutorial) to fix that problem. Having said so it sounds pretty utopian idea, but I also believe that if you let people participate (and give them the means to do so) they’ll believe in it and do everything they can to achieve it.”

An inspirational idea!

Image credits:
Romantica 2010 by Jukka Heinonen, Artisaniaflorae CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

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