1. Reporting by numbers with FixMyStreet Pro

    If you’re reporting an issue on Buckinghamshire Council’s FixMyStreet installation, you might have seen yellow dots appearing on the map. These represent items such as streetlights, bins or drains, and we blogged about it when we first added the feature.

    Streetlights plotted on FixMyStreet

    When it comes to assets like streetlights, it can save the council considerable time and effort if your report tells them precisely which light needs fixing: it’s far quicker to find an identified light than it is to follow well-meaning but perhaps vague descriptions like ‘opposite the school’!

    But even when the assets are marked on a map, it’s not always easy for a user to identify exactly which one they want to report, especially if they’ve gone home to make the report and they’re no longer standing right in front of it.

    After the system had been in place for a few weeks, the team at Buckinghamshire told us that users often weren’t pinpointing quite the right streetlight. So we thought a bit more about what could be done to encourage more accurate reports.

    As you might have noticed, streetlights are usually branded with an ID number, like this:

    Buckinghamshire, as you’d expect, holds these ID numbers as data, which means that we were able to add it to FixMyStreet. Now when you click on one of the dots, you’ll see the number displayed, like this: An identified streetlight on FixMyStreet

    The same functionality works for signs, Belisha beacons, bollards and traffic signals, as well as streetlights. Each of them has their own unique identifier.

    So, if you’re in Bucks and you want to make a report about any of these things, note down the ID number and compare it when you click on the asset. This means the correct information is sent through the first time — which, in turn, makes for a quicker fix. Win/win!

    This type of functionality is available to any council using FixMyStreet Pro: find out more here.

    Header image: Luca Florio

  2. Finding the right way to keep it in the community

    UPDATE: Keep It In The Community is now run by the Plunkett Foundation: you can find it here.

    One thing that’s not always talked about in tech is that sometimes projects take a few twists and turns before they find their final path. That’s certainly true of our Keep It In The Community project (KIITC) which aims to map Assets of Community Value across England, in collaboration with Power To Change and MHCLG.

    We’ve been blogging about the project as we progress, and if you read Mark’s blog in September you’ll have seen that we began with plans for a full central register, which would retrieve and keep in sync with information from council websites to present a countrywide overview of ACVs, and also allow community groups to register new ones.

    As we’d feared, we found that data from councils is in many varied formats, and is often moved around, meaning that getting the site to update automatically as we had first hoped would just be too difficult with the quite fragile approach of scraping and swapping spreadsheets that we had originally explored.

    And so we launched KIITC with a snapshot of the data as it existed in September 2018, all manually added by hand, and added functionality that would allow councils to maintain their own records if desired.

    Now, there’s another twist in the tale — we’re bringing some of our original vision back to the table. We’re planning some more development which will increase KIITC’s value for everyone: communities, citizens and councils alike.

    Features for community groups

    If councils don’t have the resources to maintain anything beyond the legally required bare bones register of assets, the community groups who care so passionately about the places and spaces they’re trying to secure will soon be able to get involved and help.

    This penny dropped when, in discussions with Locality, the national network supporting community groups, (and who are also funded by Power To Change) we determined that by working together more closely we could realise the ambition we have for KIITC to be a live up to date register of community assets of all types in England.

    With their collaboration, we’ll be able to talk to community groups to find out their needs, and then develop features for KIITC that will allow these groups to update existing ACVs and register new ones with details, photographs and stories.

    As part of that work in the next couple of months we’ll be adding the ability for anyone to update asset details on the site if they have more up to date information, and we’ll be improving how we display each asset to be more informative and attractive on the page.

    So watch this space as we work together on the latest twist in KIITC’s tail as we keep working on this over the next few months.


    Image: Donnie Rose (Unsplash)