FixMyStreet

What is FixMyStreet?

FixMyStreet helps you get common street problems fixed: problems like potholes, broken street lights, flytipping, dog fouling and graffiti.

How does it work?

Enter your postcode, stick a pin in the map, type in your problem and zoom!… off it goes to the council. Not sure which department in which council should be receiving your report? Don’t worry: as long as you know the street name or postcode – or are using a mobile device with geolocation – the site knows just who to send it to.

It’s so simple that over 170,000 problems have been reported through it so far.

WHY does it work?

FixMyStreet works on a simple premise: it puts your report on the website as well as sending it to the relevant council. This simple action has a number of valuable side-effects: it increases council accountability. It helps prevent the same problem being reported multiple times. It allows you to see how many issues have been reported in your own local community. And it allows councils to show how many of them it has fixed.

You can even set up email or RSS alerts to be told when problems get reported within a radius of your house or workplace, or within your ward or council.

Open source

There’s still more to FixMyStreet than this, though.

Like all mySociety projects, we built it on open source code, for people who want to hack versions in other countries – thus far, there have been many international versions, from Korea to Brazil to Norway, all using and developing that initial code.

FixMyStreet for sale

We also build bespoke, rebranded versions for councils and charities who want it here in the UK. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, read more here.

The background

Shall we tell you a secret? FixMyStreet is not really just about potholes and broken streetlights. It’s an attempt to increase everyone’s sense of empowerment in their own local community. Although, admittedly, it is also about potholes to a large degree.

FixMyStreet was built mainly by Matthew Somerville who rocks, and partly by Chris Lightfoot, who did.

Spread the word, and keep in touch

FixMyStreet only works when people know it’s available to them. So, if you’d like to spread the word, please download our posters and flyers (made by one of our volunteers, Ayesha). Tell people about the service, and encourage them to get their streets fixed.

Want to keep up with our latest news? You can read recent blog posts about FixMyStreet below, follow us on Twitter or like us on Facebook. We’re always keen to hear feedback or new ideas, and all these channels are regularly monitored.

Just a week after WhatDoTheyKnow’s big, round number, FixMyStreet also passed a significant milestone.

200,000 reports have been sent through FixMyStreet since its launch in February 2007. It currently sends an average of 250+ messages about potholes, broken streetlights, and other problems to local authorities each day. So far this month, we’ve processed just over 5,000 reports.

Those reports are the work of over 87,000 people, 52% of whom had never before reported an issue to the council. That statistic is important to us: we aim to make it easy to access civic rights, especially for people doing so for the first time.

FixMyStreet.com is a site with a simple premise, and it hasn’t changed greatly since 2007 – though it is currently undergoing a facelift, bringing it more in line with today’s design expectations. Last year we introduced user accounts and zoomable maps, along with a few tweaks here and there.

Like other mySociety projects, FixMyStreet is, of course, built on open code, so that it can be replicated by anyone with a little technical knowledge. The FixMyStreet interface is already up and running in Norway, and soon, the Philippines will see trials of their own version – proving that the model can work in very different infrastructures. Meanwhile, the basic FixMyStreet concept has been replicated in Brazil, New Zealand, and South Korea. Here in the UK, some councils have bought FixMyStreet to embed into their own websites.

FixMyStreet sends reports to the council, and also publishes them online – so each report is read by many people. This simple system helps them find out more about their local community, and what the council are doing to get things fixed.

Uneven paving stones and malfunctioning pelican crossings may not be the stuff of high drama, but against expectations, FixMyStreet does make for fascinating reading sometimes. Take a look at this page if you’d like to see some of the more unusual reports. And if you’d like some insight into some of the issues our developers deal with, you might like to read Matthew Somerville’s solution to the dog poo problem. It’s all glamour at the cutting edge of FixMyStreet.

December 23rd

Santa's Chocolate Coin Mint by Johnathan_W

If you haven’t got a penny,

A ha’penny will do,

If you haven’t got a ha’penny,

Then God bless you.

We wish you all a merry and prosperous Christmas – and for those of you who are already feeling quite prosperous enough, may we point you in the direction of our charitable donations page?

mySociety’s work is made possible by donations of all sizes and from all sorts of people. Those donations help fund all the online projects we create; projects that give easy access to your civic and democratic rights. If that’s important to you, show your appreciation, and we promise we’ll make the best use of every penny.

Thank you for sticking with us through this month-long post. We hope you’ve found it interesting and we wish you the very merriest of Christmases.

We hope you’ll continue to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ – see our Contacts page to find individual projects’ social media links.

December 22nd

What’s behind the door? A letter to Santa.

Dear Santa,

We think we’ve been pretty good this year. We’ve tried to keep our local neighbourhood clean, help with problems, and aid those in need, so we’re hoping there are a few presents coming our way.

If you can fit them down the chimney, here’s what we’re dreaming of:

More publicly available data Of course, we were delighted to hear in Mr Osborne’s autumn statement that all sorts of previously-inaccessible data will be opened up.

We’re wondering whether this new era will also answer any of our FixMyStreet geodata wishes. Santa, if you could allocate an elf to this one, we’d be ever so pleased.

Globalisation …in the nicest possible way, of course. This year has seen us work in places previously untouched by the hand of mySociety, including Kenya and the Philippines. And we continue to give help to those who wish to replicate our projects in their own countries, from FixMyStreet in Norway to WhatDoTheyKnow in Germany.

Santa, please could you fix it for us to continue working with dedicated and motivated people all around the world?

A mySociety Masters degree We’re lucky enough to have a team of talented and knowledgeable developers, and we hope we will be recruiting more in the coming year. It’s not always an easy task to find the kind of people we need – after all, mySociety is not your average workplace – so we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably easiest to make our own.

Back in February, Tom started thinking about a Masters in Public Technology. It’s still something we’re very much hoping for. Santa, is it true you have friends in academic circles?

FixMyTransport buy-in - from everyone! Regular users of FixMyTransport will have noticed that there are different kinds of response from the transport operators: lovely, fulsome, helpful ones, and formulaic ones. Or, worse still, complete refusal to engage.

Santa, if you get the chance, please could you tell the operators a little secret? Just tell them what those savvier ones already know – that FixMyTransport represents a chance to show off some fantastic customer service. And with 25,000 visitors to the site every week, that message is soon spread far and wide.

December 21st

What’s behind the window? 10 red-faced novice joggers.

It’s not long now until you’ll be making your new year’s resolutions. But will motivation drop off by February? Time to acquaint yourself with one of mySociety’s clever little projects: Hassleme.

Hassleme sends you reminders to do whatever it is you want to do, whether that’s to go for a run, tell someone you love them, or write another chapter of your blockbuster novel. Think of it as benign nagging.

Yes, you could set up your Google calendar to do just the same, but here’s the clever bit – Hassleme sends reminders at “semi-unpredictable intervals” . You can set a rough time period, such as every three days or every year – but you’ll never know precisely when that reminder will drop into your inbox.

You can even make a joint resolution, as a family, perhaps, or even in the office. Input multiple email addresses and we’ll randomise who gets each reminder – ideal for allocating tasks fairly.

Or use it to send a message to yourself ten years hence. Here are some examples from people who have done just that.

December 20th

What’s behind the door? Santa’s little helpers.

mySociety runs some pretty ambitious projects. There’s TheyWorkForYou, which publishes all parliamentary activity since 1935, as well as representatives’ voting records. Then there’s WhatDoTheyKnow, which has sent, and archived, over 30,000 freedom of information requests.

FixMyStreet maps all of Great Britain and sends your reports to the correct council contact. And now we also run FixMyTransport, with its details of over 300,000 public transport routes and stops.

None of these projects runs itself. mySociety’s core team only consists of a few people, so we rely on dedicated volunteers to help us manage the day-to-day maintenance of these sites. Our volunteers have been key to forging a community around each site, and to helping us understand exactly what we want the sites to be.

For example, our FixMyTransport volunteers (aka Anoraks) spend a lot of time leaving helpful comments on users’ problems, often before the operators can get around to answering themselves. Leading by example, they’re making FixMyTransport into a friendly and useful community, encouraging other users to make very constructive contributions, too.

The TheyWorkForYou volunteer team spent quite a bit of time analysing voting records earlier this year, allowing us to add more policy lines to each MP’s page, and providing a snapshot of their affiliations.

And, although WhatDoTheyKnow has been around for three years, the team still find themselves actively debating site policy.

We’re always delighted to welcome new volunteers. If you’re interested, drop us a line at hello@mysociety.org, or come along to one of our pub-meets. There’s one tomorrow! See the Dec 16th advent calendar entry, below, or watch this blog for details of the next one.

December 19th

What’s behind the door? A little donkey.

If you’re using public transport this Christmas, make sure you pack all the essentials: good food, presents – and the web address for FixMyTransport.com.

We hope you have a smooth journey, but if not FixMyTransport will allow you to report overcrowding, delays, or freezing cold carriages – and all on-the-go, if you have a smartphone.

Christmas is for giving, so share that URL with family, friends, and even your fellow passengers, should you find yourself in a coach or train that’s going nowhere. The power to contact the nation’s transport operators directly may just be the greatest gift you’ll ever give.

Well, ok, maybe that’s putting it a bit strongly, but when we see new bus stops being installed, new ticket machines, and longer trains being commissioned, we do start to hear angels sing.

Start your report here, or click on issues near you to see what’s irking passengers in your area. Transport all running smoothly? Lucky you – but the recent issues page is always an interesting read.

December 16th

What’s behind the door? A cup of good cheer.

Our last pub-meet of the year will be the usual chance to come and have a chat with the mySociety team and volunteers. Reindeer antlers and Santa hats are optional, but welcome. Mulled wine may be in evidence. Mince pies could well be found on the premises.

If you’ve been wanting to ask more about any of our projects, to find out about volunteering – or if you would just like a chat and a drink with friendly people – please do pop by.

When? This Wednesday, the 21st of December, from about 6pm and into the evening.

Where? We’ll be at the Prince Arthur, near Euston station in London (map). One or more of us will be wearing a mySociety hooded top, to help you identify us.

One of our New Year’s resolutions is to have meet-ups in places other than London, so if you live outside the capital, watch this space.

Spread the word Because we’re one of those new-fangled digital-type organisations, we encourage use of a hashtag: #mySocial. And you can let us know you’re coming by dropping us a tweet on @mySociety.

December 15th

What’s behind the door? A half-dead Christmas tree.

Christmas comes but once a year… and in its wake, the inevitable slew of dumped Christmas trees and uncollected bins.

In Swindon last year, household bins weren’t collected for three weeks. In Canterbury, a puzzled American tourist mistook the dead fir trees on every street for some kind of crazy English tradition.

Perhaps worse (certainly when it comes to timing), Midnight Mass was made considerably less pleasant for this church-goer in Appledore when he stepped in some dog poop.

We know councils are doing their best to clear things up in the new year, up and down the country – but if those browning Christmas trees, overflowing bins and bottle-littered streets are getting you down, don’t forget FixMyStreet.com.

December 14th

What’s behind the door? A steaming Christmas pudding.

TheyWorkForYou.com keeps a complete record of parliamentary business as far back as 1935. So not only does it  help  you stay up to date with the latest business in Parliament, it also acts as a fascinating, searchable archive.

Consider, for example:

• Why was an American actress refused permission to act in the pantomime Mother Goose? (More details in this 1936 newspaper)
• Just two months after WW2 broke out, which German goods were found on British shelves?
• How many Christmas cards did Tony Blair send in 2004?
• If church bells could only be rung as a signal of invasion, would ringing them on Xmas day cause confusion?
• Was Aberdeen worse hit than the rest of the country when it came to making Christmas puddings?
• Who played Father Christmas at the Westminster party this year?

You can search for any word or phrase on TheyWorkForYou.com. Click on ‘more options’, and you can also restrict the dates you search within.

December 13th

What’s behind the door? An icy pothole.

Does it count as bleak mid-winter yet? After the mild start to the season, in some parts of the country it still feels as if the really cold weather is yet to come.

And yet, the freeze won’t be long in coming. Uneven pavements and potholes turn from a mild inconvenience to a real hazard in the ice – and you will certainly have already noticed if your streetlights aren’t coming on, now that the dark evenings are here.

So here’s for one last big push on our Fix Before the Freeze campaign. Make sure you report all those pesky potholes, uneven pavements, and broken street lights before the snow and ice get here in earnest, and help make your local community a safer place this winter.

December 12th

What’s behind the door? An angelic host, complete with shiny halos.

Our website Pledgebank has been used for some good causes around Christmas time. It’s based on the simple idea of promising that you will do something if other people promise to, too. It’s an effective way of taking an action and multiplying its impact.

In previous years, we’ve seen a pledge to visit people who may be alone at Christmas, and another to walk for an hour on Christmas day, among others.

If you’ve got plans this Christmas – say, donating to charity, giving gifts to the poor, or even organising a party,  Pledgebank could be the tool that tips the balance and helps you get the people-power you need.

Pledgebank isn’t just for individuals: Barnet council have been innovative in their usage of the Pledgebank software for the good of their community. Check out how they are using it to arrange a collection of gifts for the needy, and gritting.

December 9th

What’s behind the door? Frosty the headless snowman.

FixMyStreet is our website for reporting problems such as potholes or broken streetlights, but last January, one user in Brighton and Hove wanted to express his outrage about something else.

Unfortunately, the council have rather less control over the kicking down of snowmen. Much as we sympathise with the frustrated anonymous reporter, we can’t really blame the council for not responding to this particular complaint.

Meanwhile, in Midlothian, we see nature doing the fixing but the council apparently taking the credit, much to our user’s displeasure.

If your neighbourhood suffers from uncleared snow, by all means use FixMyStreet.com to report it this year. If you feel the gritting could have been better, report it. If your snowman suffers an injury, however, maybe keep it to yourself.

December 8th

What’s behind the door? A boring old bauble again.

What is a “Christmas Tree bill”?

A search through Hansard reveals that this is a commonly-used term in Parliament, and it refers to a bill which, as it passes through its various stages, has all sorts of “baubles” hung on it – that is to say, small, unrelated issues which are added to the main legislation.

The term apparently originated in the States, but has become commonplace in UK parliamentary discourse – and indeed provides an opportunity for some florid extemporising, as David Burrowes, Private Secretary, demonstrated recently in a debate about knife crime:

“As we look forward to Christmas and see today the Third Reading of a criminal justice Bill, I am reminded of previous Government Bills that ended up as Christmas tree Bills with baubles being hung on them at any given opportunity as they went through Parliament. I am sure that as this Bill goes to the other place, Ministers will want to ensure that further baubles are not hung on it in the form of extra pieces of law that take the fancy of noble Lords, as well as any little elves.”

Did you know that you can subscribe to any word or phrase on TheyWorkForYou? It’s very handy for making sure you know whenever your pet topic is debated. Set up your alert here.

December 7th

What’s behind the door? A kindly Santa Claus

Our website WriteToThem.com allows you to contact your elected representatives – even if you don’t know who they are.

When you input your postcode, you’re given a list of your local councillors, MPs, MEPs and anyone else who represents you in any of our governmental bodies. The site then allows you to contact them directly.

That’s all very well, but what about the highest administration of them all – the one who decides if you’ve been naughty or nice? Sadly, WriteToThem.com does not cover Lapland, but we do have a helpful page providing Santa’s postal address in full.

Meanwhile, it’s just a thought – but you might find that putting your wishlist in front of your local representatives actually has more effect than a letter sent up the chimney, especially if it concerns your civic or community rights. Start here.

December 6th

What’s behind the door? A fizzling, blinking neon light

Our parents always told us that if decorations weren’t removed by Twelfth Night, terrible things would happen – but it seems that some councils are not so superstitious. Users of our website FixMyStreet reveal the occasionally erratic handling of this tradition.

7th of January was already too late for a resident of Durham. How would he have felt had he lived in Thatcham, where decorations were still up on the 18th of January?

It gets worse. In Birmingham, one lonely decoration was spotted on the 31st of January. In Consett, not only were the decorations taken down after Epiphany had passed, but they had been on 24 hours a day for the entire Xmas period. In the village of Cark, the Christmas tree was blocking access to a car park in early February. But we think Bournemouth takes the prize, with a Christmas decoration reported as still being in place on the 15th of March.

People are always complaining that Christmas starts too early – and now it seems it’s also dragging on too late. If you’d like to report council decorations that have outstayed their welcome, don’t forget FixMyStreet.com this January.

The 5th of January, in fact, if you’d like to adhere to Twelfth Night superstition. We’ll be looking out for the spike in users on that day.

December 5th

What’s behind the door? An inn, with no vacancies over the Christmas period

It’s more than 2,000 years since a heavily pregnant Mary was told there was no room at the inn. With zoning restrictions a thing of the far-distant future, an empty stable was repurposed for her use, and… well, you know the rest.

Today, if there’s an empty stable (or, more likely, a house) near you, Channel 4 want to know about it. They are broadcasting the first in their Great British Property Scandal series tonight, examining the causes behind homelessness.

Key to the campaign is the fact that there are over a million empty properties in the UK, while two million families need a home. On their site you’ll find an empty property spotter tool, which allows you to report any vacant buildings to your council. There’s also an app.

Those tools have been built by a crack team of mySociety developers, drawing on our extensive experience of mashing up postcode and constituency data, and sending reports off to the right council contacts. If you’re wondering where we honed such skills, look no further than FixMyStreet, WriteToThem, and TheyWorkForYou, among other mySociety projects.

Not everyone knows that mySociety are available for contracting. All revenue from our commercial activities goes towards funding our not-for-profit projects. It’d really make our Christmas special if you were to spread the word, next time you hear of someone in need of innovative and really rather well-priced development work.

December 2nd

What’s behind the door? Ten Lords a-tweeting

Why is a Christmas card better than a tweet? It turns out not to be the start of a bad joke…

As Roger Gale MP revealed in a debate on the use of electronic devices (including mobile phones) in the Chamber of the House of Commons, “multi-tasking and a dual use of time” means that in the six weeks before Christmas “committee tables will suddenly be piled with Christmas cards being signed while Members are also participating in Committee business”.

Gale’s point is that such behaviour is excusable, but that having MPs updating their Twitter and Facebook statuses in the Chamber would be a bridge too far. What do you reckon? Personally we’d rather have a stream of useful comment, accessible from our phones or desktop computers, than a hastily-signed Christmas card.

Whether you’re a social media junkie, or agree that such things are unwelcome in the workplace, the entire debate is worth a read – along with hundreds of thousands of other speeches and statements from Lords and MPs, available on mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou.com.

December 1st

Children everywhere open the first door of their Advent calendars today – and we’re digging deep into the mySociety vat of Christmas spirit and presenting our very own countdown to the 25th. Didn’t think a civic and democratic charity had much in common with Christmas? Well, we’re here to prove otherwise.

Between now and the 25th, we’ll be updating this post each weekday with a Christmassy nugget from our archives. Enjoy them, and here’s hoping that Santa brings you whatever your heart desires, whether it’s the reply to that FOI request you put in on WhatDoTheyKnow.com, or the improved bus service you asked for on FixMyTransport.com.

What’s behind the door? A string of flashing lights

As Christmas lights go on in towns and cities across the country, your inner Scrooge might be prompted to ask just how much they’re costing the public purse.

Never fear, Bah Humbuggers, for this is a topic that has been thoroughly explored by the users of our Freedom of Information request website WhatDoTheyKnow.com. See, for example, how Manchester cannily bartered for free celebrity appearances last year, while Lewisham puts importance on low-energy lightbulbs.

You can also check Westminster, Lewes, and Cardiff’s costs – and plenty more besides. We think that Leeds has the highest expenditure mentioned, at £477,600 for this year, but leave us a comment if you find a higher one.

Don’t forget that if you want to know how much your own council spent on Christmas decorations – or indeed anything else – you have the right to submit an  FOI request. Just remember to check that the information isn’t already available online before you do.

In the nine days our Fix Before the Freeze campaign has been running, there’s been a 47% increase in reports on FixMyStreet.com. Thank you to everyone who has spread the word or remembered to use the site to get something fixed.

As you may remember, the campaign encourages you to report problems such as broken streetlights or potholes before winter comes. It’s great to see this start to happen, and we hope you’ll experience the benefits once the cold weather takes grip. Hey, you might even find that the warm glow of community spirit cuts a few quid from your fuel bills…

Meanwhile, we’re sure there are still plenty of pavements, roads and amenities that could do with a patch-up before winter. So if there’s a gap on a notice board near you, don’t forget our print-outs and resources here. How about printing out a few and leaving them in your local library, cafe, or community centre?

You may already be aware of our website FixMyStreet.com, which helps you report common street problems – such as potholes and uneven pavements – to the relevant local council. This year, we thought we’d give people a gentle nudge before winter comes.

Many of the 1,000  issues which the site deals with every week are of the sort which are far better seen to before the big freeze. Potholes only worsen with the frost, and no-one wants a dodgy streetlight once the long dark nights are here.

How to join Fix Before the Freeze

• Check for problems Will your walk home from work tonight be in the dark? Look out for areas that could be better lit or paths that might cause people to stumble in the dark.

• Report it If you see something that is better fixed before the freeze, now’s the time to let your council know. It only take a minute at FixMyStreet.com.

• Spread the word We’ve created the image above as a website icon, flier, and poster. Follow the links at the foot of this post to download them, or use the code if you’d prefer to link back. Why not put one on your blog, hand them out at work, or stick one in your window? Please spread the word among friends and family too.

• Spread the word further We’d be grateful for mentions on your preferred social media hang-out (you can use the #FB4TF hashtag).

• Keep in touch You can ‘like’ us on Facebook here, or follow us on Twitter here.

Let’s get our local communities as safe as they can be, before the cold weather hits.

Downloads

Click on each thumbnail to be taken to the actual-size resource, then right click or ctrl+click to save a copy to your hard drive.

A4 sheet of fliers to print out:

Poster to print out:

Badge for your blog or website (165×165 pixels):

(If you’d like a larger image, feel free to save the one at the top of this post).

HTML for inserting the badge onto your site without downloading – just copy and paste the below into your HTML editor:

<a href=”http://www.mysociety.org/?p=4790″ title=”Find out more about Fix Before the Freeze from FixMyStreet.com”><Img alt=”Fix Before the Freeze – report those dangerous potholes and  broken streetlights before winter hits” src=”http://www.mysociety.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/fixbeforethefreezebadge165.gif”></a>

FixMyStreet, is, as its name suggests, a system that reports street problems to the relevant local council. But at heart, it’s a problem-reporting system that could be adapted for a multitude of different uses.

For example, with just a few modifications, large institutions such as hospitals could use it for everyone – staff, visitors, patients – to report maintenance issues. Same for universities, especially those spread over large campuses. Supermarket chains could adapt it so that people could report abandoned trolleys – in fact we’ve been admiring an Aussie site that’s way ahead of us on that idea.

We’ve been enjoying thinking of new possible uses, from the practical to the frankly rather ridiculous, but we’re also keen to hear any ideas we might not have thought of. Is there an area in your life – personal or professional – that would be made much easier if you had an easy way to report it on-the-go? What challenges do you see, and why hasn’t it been done  before? Ideas below, please.

This post explains how various aspects of the new FixMyStreet maps work, including how we supply our own OS StreetView tile server and how the maps work without JavaScript.

Progressive enhancement

During our work on FiksGataMi (the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet) with NUUG, we factored out the map code (for the Perlmongers among you, it’s now using Module::Pluggable to pick the required map) as FiksGataMi was going to be using OpenStreetMap, and we had plans to improve our own mapping too. Moving to OpenLayers rather than continuing to use our own slippy map JavaScript dating from 2006 was an obvious decision for FiksGataMi (and then FixMyStreet), but FixMyStreet maps have always been usable without JavaScript, utilising the ancient HTML technology of image maps to provide the same functionality, and we wanted to maintain that level of universality with OpenLayers. Thankfully, this isn’t hard to do – simply outputting the relevant tiles and pins as part of the HTML, allowing latitude/longitude/zoom to be passed as query parameters, and a bit of maths to convert image map tile clicks to the actual latitude/longitude selected. So if you’re on a slow connection, or for whatever reason don’t get the OpenLayers JavaScript in some way, the maps on FixMyStreet should still work fine. I’m not really aware of many people who use OpenLayers that do this (or indeed any JavaScript mapping API), and I hope to encourage more to do so by this example.

Zooming

We investigated many different maps, and as I wrote in my previous blog post, we decided upon a combination of OS StreetView and Bing Maps’ OS layer as the best solution for the site. The specific OpenLayers code for this (which you can see in map-bing-ol.js is not complicated (as long as you don’t leave in superfluous commas breaking the site in IE6!) – overriding the getURL function and returning appropriate tile URLs based upon the zoom level. OpenLayers 2.11 (due out soon) will make using Bing tiles even easier, with its own seamless handling of them, as opposed to my slight bodge with regard to attribution (I’m displaying all the relevant copyright statements, rather than just the one for the appropriate location and zoom level which the new OpenLayers will do for you). I also had to tweak bits of the OpenLayers map initialisation so that I could restrict the zoom levels of the reporting map, something which again I believe is made easier in 2.11.

OpenStreetMap

Having pluggable maps makes it easy to change them if necessary – and it also means that for those who wish to use it, we can provide an OpenStreetMap version of FixMyStreet. This works by noticing the hostname and overriding the map class being asked for; everything necessary to the map handling is contained within the module, so the rest of the site can just carry on without realising anything is different.

OS StreetView tile server

Things started to get a bit tricky when it came to being ready for production. In development, I had been using http://os.openstreetmap.org/ (a service hosted on OpenStreetMap’s development server) as my StreetView tile server, but I did not feel that I could use it for the live site – OpenStreetMap rightly make no reliability claims for it, it has a few rendering issues, and we would probably be having quite a bit of traffic which was not really fair to pass on to the service. I wanted my own version that I had control over, but then had a sinking feeling that I’d have to wait a month for something to process all the OS TIFF files (each one a 5km square) into millions and millions of PNG tiles. But after many diversions and dead ends, and with thanks to a variety of helpful web pages and people (Andrew Larcombe’s guide to his similar install was helpful), I came up with the following working on-demand set-up, with no pre-seeding necessary, which I’m documenting in case it might be useful to someone else.

Requests come in to our tile server at tilma.mysociety.org, in standard OSM/Google tile URL format (e.g. http://tilma.mysociety.org/sv/16/32422/21504.png. Apache passes them on to TileCache, which is set up to cache as GoogleDisk (ie. in the same format as the URLs) and to pass on queries as WMS internally to MapServer using this layer:

[sv]
type=WMS
url=path/to/mapserv.fcgi?map=os.map&
layers=streetview
tms_type=google
spherical_mercator=true

MapServer is set up with a Shapefile (generated by gdaltindex) pointing at the OS source TIFF and TFW files, meaning it can map tile requests to the relevant bits of the TIFF files quickly and return the correct tile (view MapServer’s configuration – our tileserver is so old, this is still in CVS). The OUTPUTFORMAT section at the top is to make sure the tiles returned are anti-aliased (at one point, I thought I had a choice between waiting for tiles to be prerendered anti-aliased, or going live with working but jaggedy tiles – thankfully I persevered until it all worked :) ).

Other benefits of OpenLayers

As you drag the map around, you want the pins to update – the original OpenLayers code I wrote used the Markers layer to display the pins, which has the benefit of being simple, but doesn’t fit in with the more advanced OpenLayers concepts. Once this was switched to a Vector layer, it now has access to the BBOX strategy, which just needs a URL that can take in a bounding box and return the relevant data. I created a subclass of OpenLayers.Format.JSON, so that the server can return data for the left hand text columns, as well as the relevant pins for the map itself.

Lastly, using OpenLayers made adding KML overlays for wards trivial and made those pages of the site much nicer. The code for displaying an area from MaPit is as follows:

    if ( fixmystreet.area ) {
        var area = new OpenLayers.Layer.Vector("KML", {
            strategies: [ new OpenLayers.Strategy.Fixed() ],
            protocol: new OpenLayers.Protocol.HTTP({
                url: "/mapit/area/" + fixmystreet.area + ".kml?simplify_tolerance=0.0001",
                format: new OpenLayers.Format.KML()
            })
        });
        fixmystreet.map.addLayer(area);
        area.events.register('loadend', null, function(a,b,c) {
            var bounds = area.getDataExtent();
            if (bounds) { fixmystreet.map.zoomToExtent( bounds ); }
        });
    }

Note that also shows a new feature of MaPit – being able to ask for a simplified KML file, which will be smaller and quicker (though of course less accurate) than the full boundary.

Last week, FixMyStreet gained a number of new features that we hope you will find useful.

Firstly, we’ve thrown away our old maps and replaced them with new, shiny, zoomable maps. This should make it easier for people to find and report problems, especially in sparser locations. We’re using the OS StreetView layer (hosted internally) when zoomed in, reverting to Bing Maps’ Ordnance Survey layer when zoomed out, as we felt this provided the best combination for reporting problems. In urban areas, you can still see individual houses, whilst in more rural areas the map with footpaths and other such features is probably of more use. FixMyStreet tries to guess initially which map would be most appropriate based upon population density, meaning a search for Stroud looks a bit different from that for Birmingham.

OpenStreetMap fans, don’t worry – as part of our mapping technology upgrade, you can now use osm.fixmystreet.com to access your favourite mapping instead.

Secondly, we now have user accounts. We’ve rolled these out alongside our current system of email confirmation, and it’s up to you which you use when reporting a problem or leaving an update. This means that those who come to the site one time only to report a pothole can continue to do so quickly, but have the option of an account if they want. Having an account means you no longer have to confirm reports and updates by email, and you have access to a page listing all the reports you’ve made through FixMyStreet, and showing these reports on a (obviously new and shiny) summary map.

Other improvements include a much nicer All Reports section, so you can see all reports to Adur District Council on a map, paginated and with the boundary of the council marked – and individual wards of councils now each have their own pages too.

I’ll follow up this post with another, more technical, look at the maps and how they work, for anyone who’s interested :)

On Twitter about 15 minutes ago, @greenerleith asked: “Has anyone worked out how to display the most recent #fixmystreet reports on a local map widget that can be embedded? #hyperlocal”

Like this? :)

View Larger Map

It’s very simple to do:

1. Go to FixMyStreet, and locate any RSS feed of the latest reports you want (for the above map, I used Edinburgh Waverley’s postcode of EH1 1BB; you could have used reports to a particular council, or ward, using the Local alerts section). Copy the URL of the RSS feed.
2. Go to Google Maps, paste the RSS feed URL into its search box, and click Search Maps.
3. Click the “Link” link to the top right of the map, and copy the “Paste HTML to embed in website” code.
4. Paste that code into your blog post, sidebar, or wherever (you can alter the code to change its size etc.).
5. Done. :-)

The latest reports from FixMyStreet, superimposed on a Google Map, embedded in your blog. Hope that’s helpful.

I must admit that I’m pretty happy to announce mySociety’s  plans to build our first major new non-comercial website since WhatDoTheyKnow.com launched in 2008. Late in 2010 we plan to launch FixMyTransport , a site focussed on connecting and empowering people who share transport problems of different kinds. The fantabulous Louise Crow will be lead developer.

Crucially, we at mySociety are under no illusions that it is an order of magnitude more difficult to get a new ticket machine in your station than it is to get your local council to fill a pothole (FixMyStreet surveys report 2371 problems fixed in the last month alone). The difficulty of achieving even minor changes to transport services and infrastructure is why we are simultaneously announcing our plan to build FixMyTransport on top of a major new back end system called Project Fosbury.

Project Fosbury is about helping people get over difficult obstacles.  It is a modular platform for breaking down a complicated civic task into pieces which can then be allocated to one or more people. So someone asking their council to change the timing on some traffic lights might be allocated the tasks of:

• Writing to their councillors
• Obtaining local policy on traffic light timings from the council
• Getting people to join a mini-campaign group
• Videoing the problem
• Sending a letter to a local newspaper

Each task will ultimately be carried out entirely within a joined up infrastructure, each module being built to mySociety’s habitually stringent rule that “it must be easy and satisfying to someone who’s never engaged politically before”. We will work to create incentive structures, peer pressure, and hopefully a sense of fun. There will be a single public home page for each mini campaign, showing recent activities on the site, as well as integrating with external social media.  We hope to repeat the FixMyStreet phenomena where some  ‘insoluble’ problems suddenly become soluble once they’re in the public domain.

Now for the credit where it is due. mySociety’s sysadmin Keith Garrett suggested FixMyTransport back in January 2008.

The actual mechanics of breaking the problem into pieces (the idea that became Project Fosbury) came from a wide discussion at our retreat, with excellent suggestions coming particularly from Richard Pope. But the more general idea that the Internet hasn’t yet produced a really good system for bringing people together to solve everyday problems (as opposed to chat, or win the US presidency) came from numerous Call for Proposals submissions, including ones from Mark W, Rob Shorrock, Peter Silverman, Mahmood Choudhury and more.

mySociety will be building this site using money donated by people like you, profits from commercial projects, and any specific funding we can raise around it. If you know of anyone or any organisation that you think might like to support FixMyTransport or Project Fosbury, please do get in touch.

Note: This post is a work in progress, I need your help to improve it, especially with knowledge of non-English sites

I was recently in Washington DC catching up with mySociety’s soul-mates at the Sunlight Foundation. As we talked about what was going on in the field of internet-enabled transparency, it came clear to me that there are now more identifiable categories of transparency website than there used to be.

Identifying and categorising these types of site turns out to be surprisingly useful.  First, it can help people ask “Why don’t we have anyone doing that in our country?” Second, it can help mySociety to make sure that when we’re planning ahead we don’t fail to consider certain options that be currently off our radar. Also, it gives me an excuse to tell you about some sites that you may not have seen before.

Anyway, enough preamble. Here they are as I see them – please give me more suggestions as you find them. As you can see there’s a lot more activity in some fields than others.

1. Transparency blogs & newspapers – At the technically simplest, but most manual labour-intensive end of the scale is sites, commercial and volunteer driven, whose owners use transparency to help them to write stories. Given almost every political blog does this a bit, it can be hard to name specific examples, but I will note that Heather Brooke is the UK’s pre-eminent FOI-toting journalist/blogger, and we’ve just opened a blog for our awesome volunteers on WhatDoTheyKnow to show their FOI skills to an as-yet unsuspecting public.

2. What Politicians do in their parliaments – These sites primarily include lists of politicians, and information about their primary activities in their assemblies, such as voting or speaking. This encompasses mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou.com, Rob McKinnon’s one man labour of love TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, Italy’s uber-deep OpenPolis.it (6 layers of government, anyone?), Germany’s almost-un-typable Abgeordnetenwatch,  Romania’s writ-wielding IPP.ro, Josh Tauberer’sGovTrack.us, plus the bonny bouncing babies OpenAustralia and Kildare Street (Ireland). Of special note here are Mzalendo (Kenya) who unlike everyone else, can’t reply on access to a parliamentary website to scrape raw data from, and Julian Todd’s UNDemocracy (International), that has to fight incredible technical barriers to get the information out.

3. Databases of questions and answers posed to politicians – These sites let people post politicians questions, and the publish the questions and answers. The Germans running Abgeordnetenwatch (Parliament Watch) seem to have had considerable success here, with newspapers citing what politicians say on their site. Yoosk has some politicians in the UK on it, too.

4. Money in politics – This comes in two forms, money given to candidates (MAPlight), and money bunged by politicians to their favourite causes (Earmark watch). In the UK, as far as I know, the Electoral Commission’s database remains currently unscraped, perhaps because the data is so ungranular.

5. Government spending – where the big money goes. In the US the dominant site is FedSpending.org, and in the UK we have ukpublicspending.co.uk.

6. Websites containing bills going through parliament, or the law as voted on – This includes the increasingly substantial OpenCongress in the US which saw major traffic during the Health Care debates, and the UK government’s own Acts database and  Statute Law Database. Much of the legal database field, however, remains essentially private.

7. Services that create transparency as a side effect of delivering services – Our own sites lead the way here: FixMyStreet‘s public problem reports and WhatDoTheyKnow’s FOI archive are both created by people who aren’t primarily using the site to enrich it – they’re using it to get some other service.

8. Election websites – These come in many forms, but what they have in common is their desire to shed light on the positions and histories of candidates, whether incumbents or new comers. The biggest beast here is Stemwijzer (Netherlands), probably in relative terms the most used transparency or democracy site ever. However these sites are popular in several places,  the big but highly labour intensive VoteSmart (US), Smartvote.ch (Switzerland), plus others.  mySociety is shortly to start to recruit constituency volunteers to help with our take on this problem, keep an eye on this blog if you want to know more.

9. Political document archives - This is a new category, now occupied by Sunlight’s Partytime archive for invitation to political events, and TheStraightChoice, Julian Todd and Richard Pope’s wonderful new initiative for archiving election leaflets and other paper propoganda.

10. Bulk data - Online transparency pioneer Carl Malamud doesn’t do sites, he does data. Big globs zipped up and made publicly available for coders and researchers to download and process. The US government has now stepped into this field itself with Data.gov, doubtless soon to be followed by data.gov.uk.

——

Please don’t shoot me if I’ve missed anything here, the world is a big place. But I thought that was a useful and interesting exercise, and I hope you’ll both find it useful, and help me improve it too. Comment away.

A number of people report dog fouling through FixMyStreet, using slightly more… colloquial language. A number of councils have strict obscenity filters, blocking anything containing swearing. As I’m a pragmatist and not that interested in campaigning against councils blocking legitimate emails from their citizens (feel free!), FixMyStreet simply changes any “dog shit” reference to “dog poo”. This works well for everyone.

Recently, the infamous Intellectual Property Manager from Portakabin™ Limited got in touch to complain about a couple of reports on FixMyStreet containing the words “portacabin” or “portaloo”. Again, as a pragmatist, I’m not really interested in whether users using trade marks or trade mark variants in a generic way on a problem report actually constitutes trade mark infringment (actually, I’d guess not), I just want legal people to go away and not waste our precious resources. So from now on, any report containing portakabin or similar will become [portable cabin], and portaloo will become [portable loo].

For anyone who’s interested, this is accomplished through a simple regular expression, that looks for porta followed by 0 or more spaces, then cabin, kabin, or loo, and sticks “ble” in the middle.

We’ve had reports that our FixMyStreet iPhone app is crashing on iPhone 3.0, and so have withdrawn it from the App Store until we are able to find out what’s wrong and fix it. I’m afraid I don’t know when that will be, as it’s all rather busy at present – if anyone has the skills and would like to volunteer to help, the code is available and should just import into XCode. I can supply some crash logs too.

They could perhaps have picked a better day, as it was quite serious – at the stroke of midnight on the 1st of April, 37 district councils and 7 county councils in England ceased to exist, replaced by 9 new unitary authorities. This means people in Durham, Northumberland, Cornwall, Shropshire, Wiltshire, Chesire, and Bedfordshire only have one principal local authority to deal with now. The Wikipedia article on the changes has more information on the background to this change.

Obviously this meant some work for WriteToThem and FixMyStreet, both of which require up-to-date local council information. Our database of voting areas, MaPit, has “generations”, so we can keep old areas around for various historical purposes. So firstly, I created a new generation and updated all the areas that weren’t affected to the new generation. Next, six of the new unitary authorities (all the counties except Cheshire and Bedfordshire, plus Bedford) share their boundaries and wards with the coterminous councils they’re replacing, so for them it was a simple matter of updating those councils to be unitary authorities.

That left Bedfordshire and Cheshire. I created areas for the three new councils (Cheshire West and Chester, Cheshire East, and Central Bedfordshire), and transferred across the relevant wards from the old county councils – basically a manual process of working out the list of correct ward IDs. april2009-update.sql has the gory SQL details if you care.

WriteToThem was now dealt with, but FixMyStreet needed a little more work. The councils that no longer existed had understandably disappeared from the all reports table, so I had to modify the function that fetches the list of councils to optionally return historical areas so they could be included. And lastly, FixMyStreet needs a way of mapping a point on a map to the relevant council. For this, it needs to know the area covered by a council, which was missing for the new authorities I’d manually created. Thankfully, each of the three new authorities are made up of the areas of either 2 or 3 district councils (e.g. Cheshire East is the area covered by Congleton, Macclesfield, and Crewe and Nantwich), so I just had to write a script that stuck those areas together to create the area of the new council. april2009-construct-new.pl. It all seems to work, and I’m sure our users will be in touch if it doesn’t :)

So goodbye to Alnwick, Bedfordshire, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Blyth Valley, Bridgnorth, Caradon, Carrick, Castle Morpeth, Cheshire, Chester, Chester-le-Street, Congleton, Crewe and Nantwich, Derwentside, Durham City, Easington, Ellesmere Port and Neston, Kennet, Kerrier, Macclesfield, Mid Bedfordshire, North Cornwall, North Shropshire, North Wiltshire, Oswestry, Penwith, Restormel, Salisbury (which is getting a new town council), Sedgefield, Shrewsbury and Atcham, South Bedfordshire, South Shropshire, Teesdale, Tynedale, Vale Royal, Wansbeck, Wear Valley, and West Wiltshire. RIP.

I’m very excited to announce that the iPhone app for FixMyStreet is now live and available for download on the App Store (link opens the App Store in iTunes). You can now record a problem when out and about with your iPhone, using its camera and GPS, ready for checking and submitting to the council. Hopefully people will find this useful! :)

Download FixMyStreet iPhone on the App Store.

Last month saw the launch of not one but two websites asking the public to report empty properties to the relevant council. First off the blocks was mySociety’s ReportEmptyHomes.com, commissioned by the Empty Homes Agency, followed shortly afterwards by EveryHomeCounts.info from a group of eight councils in Surrey and Hampshire. Since mySociety claims to want to show the public sector how to use the internet properly, I thought it might be interesting to compare the two sites, at least from a user’s perspective.

I’m going to imagine I was walking down, say, Fosters Lane in Knaphill, Surrey, and I noticed that the house on the corner next to the chip shop was in a state of disrepair.* I snapped a picture on my mobile phone, and I want to send it to the council to see if they can do something about it.
[*I ought to just add that this is entirely fictional. I've never been to Knaphill, I've no idea whether there's a chippy on Fosters Lane, and even if there is, the house next to it probably belongs to a lovely couple. Please don't go taking pictures of their house for the council.]

So, first up: EveryHomeCounts.info. Clicking the big red REPORTING AN EMPTY PROPERTY button takes me to a page of text telling me why the council might like people to report empty properties, although presumably if I’ve got as far as finding the website and clicking the big red button, I’m already convinced of the case. At the bottom of the text I’m invited to “click here” to report an empty property.

On the next page I’m asked for… a whole load of personal information. I want to tell you about an empty house; do I really need to declare my title, first name, surname, house name, house number, street, locality, town, county, postcode, country, telephone number, and email address before doing so? Well, as it turns out, no — they only insist on an email address (although the single letter “f” was accepted as a valid email address).

On to page four, and I’m finally asked for the address of the house. I suppose “house on the corner next to the chippy, Queens Road, Knaphill” would probably be enough for the council to identify it. But then — get this — they want me to tell them which borough council might be responsible for this address, so that the report can be sent to the right place! Unless I happen to live in that street, how would I know? Even if I could have an educated guess, it might be near a boundary, or just over a boundary… Leaving the field blank isn’t allowed, and there’s no option that says “I’m not sure, sorry” — I’m told in red ink that I must specify a council if I want to continue filing my report.

Finally, I reach a screen that says at the top, “Thank you. You have reached the end of this form. blah blah” The second paragraph says, “What will happen next? The council will process your form. You will receive an email blah blah.” So, I pat myself on the back, turn off the computer and go for a walk. Except that if I’d scrolled down the page, I would have seen “submit” button, along with the “review” and “cancel” buttons. My form hasn’t been submitted, and I’ve wasted half an hour filling in a form that’s been thrown away.

Now, what would have happened if I’d gone to ReportEmptyHomes.com instead?

The top of the front page asks me for a postcode, street name or area. I enter “Fosters Lane, Knaphill” and hit enter. This brings up an Ordnance Survey map with Fosters Lane in the middle of it, and I click on the offending property. The text on the page immediately changes and tells me that this problem falls in the area of Woking Borough Council, and I’m asked for a description of the property, a photo if I’ve got one to upload, my name, email and phone number.

Having filled in the information and clicked “submit”, I’m told to go off and check my emails, where I’ll find a confirmation link to click. This finalises the report.

So, how do the two sites compare? The mySociety site certainly gets the user through the process quicker, and offers maps and photos to boot. It helps the user greatly by taking responsibility for finding the right council, and does so for the whole country too, not just for a couple of counties in the south. On the down side, one could question why it’s so important to verify the user’s email address before filing the report; waiting for a confirmation link by email adds an extra hurdle which will probably trip at least some users, so why do it?

Also, EveryHomeCounts.info isn’t just for filing reports about empty homes; it contains information on buying, selling, owning and letting them too, providing ways for local people to perhaps make use of empty properties without enlisting the council’s help at all, which can only be a good thing.

To be fair, the councils concerned should be applauded for taking the initiative to launch this service, and I hope it proves to be a worthwhile use of council tax money. It’s great to see public bodies using the internet in innovative ways to try to make concrete improvements in people’s immediate environment. It appears though that mySociety have shown that it can be done better, and for the whole country, and probably more cheaply to boot.

Last week I gave my first presentation by video conference. It was to the intriguing Circus Foundation, who are running a series of workshops on new democracy. It came about because I was a bit busy and tired to travel from Cambridge into London. Charles Armstrong, from the Circus Foundation, suggested that I present over the Internet.

We used Skype audio and video, combined with GoToMeeting so my laptop screen was visible on a projector to an audience in London. Apparently my voice was boomed round the room. It was a slightly odd experience, more like speaking on the radio. However, I had a good serendipitous one to one chat while we were setting up, with Jonathan Gray from OKFN.

I was asked to give a quick overview of mySociety, as a few people in the audience hadn’t heard of us, and also to talk about how I saw the future of democracy. I talked about three of our sites, and what I’d like to see in each area in 10 years time.

• TheyWorkForYou opens up access to conventional, representational democracy, between and during elections. In 10 years time, I asked for Parliament to publish all information about its work in a structured way, as hinted at in our Free Our Bills campaign. So it is much easier for everyone to help make new laws better.
• FixMyStreet is local control of the things people care about, a very practical democracy. In 10 years time I’d like to see all councils running their internal systems (planning, tree preservation orders… everything that isn’t about individuals) in public, so everyone can see and be reassured about what is being done, why and where.
• WhatDoTheyKnow shows the deep interest that there is by the public in the functioning of all areas of government. In 10 years time, I’d like to see document management systems in wide use by public authorities that publish all documents by default. Only if overridden for national security or data protection reasons would they be hidden.

Charles Armstrong, from the Circus Foundation, has written up the workshop.

Downsides of the video conferencing were that I couldn’t hear others speak, as they didn’t have the audio equipment. I had to take questions via Charles. This meant I also couldn’t participate in the rest of the evening, or easily generally chat to people. All very solvable problems, with a small amount of extra effort – Charles is going to work on it for another time.

Of course this also all saves on carbon emissions (cheekily, taking off my mySociety hat for a moment, sign up to help lobby about that).

FixMyStreet has a lot of RSS feeds. There’s one for every one-tier council (170), one for every ward of every one-tier council (another 5,044), two for every two-tier (county and district) council (544), and two for every ward of every two-tier council (20,296) – two per two-tier council because you might want either problems reported to one council of a two-tier set-up in particular, or all reports within the council’s boundary.

Then there’s an RSS feed every 162m across Great Britain in a big grid, returning all reports within a radius of that point, the radius by default being automatically determined by that point’s population density, but customisable to any distance if preferred. That’s, at a very rough approximation assuming Great Britain is a rectangle around its extremities, which it’s not, 19 million RSS feeds, lots of which will admittedly be very similar. :)

Every single one of those feeds can be subscribed to by email instead if that’s preferable to you, and are all accessible through a simple interface at http://www.fixmystreet.com/alert.

However, none of these RSS feeds was suitable for the person who emailed from a Neighbourhood Watch site and said that all they had was a postcode and they wanted to display a feed of reports from FixMyStreet. Given you could obviously look up a FixMyStreet map by postcode, it did seem odd that I hadn’t used the same code for the RSS feeds. Shortly thereafter, this anomaly was fixed, and if you now go to a URL of the form http://www.fixmystreet.com/rss/pc/postcode you will be redirected to the appropriate local reports feed for that postcode (I could say that adds another 1.7 million RSS feeds to our lot, but given they’re only redirects, that’s not strictly true). And after a couple more emails, I also added pubDate fields to the feeds which should make displaying in date order easier.

It’s great to see our RSS feeds being used by other sites – other examples I’ve recently come across include Brent Council integrating FixMyStreet into their mapping portal (select Streets, then FixMyStreet), or the Albert Square and St Stephen’s Association listing the most recent Stockwell problems in their blog sidebar. If you’ve seen any notable examples, do leave them in the comments.

Last week at the SustainIT eWell-Being Awards, we picked up an award for FixMyStreet. The judges said it was “[a]n excellent example of an independent website which empowers the general public in their dealings with their local council. It is a relatively simple application, yet highly effective and replicable.” One example the accompanying Independent supplement mentioned was “a community in Great Yarmouth which joined forces through FixMyStreet to clear their local unused railway track. The site made possible a dialogue between community members and the council’s community development worker, who organised a “clear up” day where locals could get involved with rectifying the situation, with tools, insurance and even a barbeque provided.” It’s great to see that sort of thing happening on the site, and also great to be recognised in this way.

In a spirit of celebration (though more to celebrate the endorsements the campaign has received), TheyWorkForYou now covers the Scottish Parliament – see the TheyWorkForYou news for more information.

Residents turn to web in lane fight describes a set of problems reported on FixMyStreet.

A NARROW mountain lane has been damaged and turned into an “international playground” for 4x4s and satnav-guided lorries, angry villagers claimed yesterday.

The interesting thing is the claim that making the reports public really helped pressurise the authority into fixing them

one [resident] claimed the local authority had now been “embarrassed” into action by the complaints on fixmystreet.com