Those nice people over at mySociety have been working for a while now on a new facility for reporting problems to local councils.

FixMyStreet allows anyone to report problems which FixMyStreet passes onto the relevant authority.

FixMyStreet was paid for via the Department for Constitutional Affairs Innovations Fund and launched a year ago and went through a name change recently.

The site runs as a charity and I wonder if that is one of the problems with it. It’s competitor CommunityFix has a better designed look and feel and at first glance seems to win as it uses Google Maps rather than what appears to be iffy scans of local authority plans.

Why on earth does the summary of all reports not scroll with the column headings remaining fixed and just what is the difference between “New problems”, “Older problems”, “Old problems state unknown”, “Recently fixed” and “Old fixed”?

I’d much rather see some naming and shaming of councils in a summary form. I’m not interest in Aberdeen City Council just the one who should be sorting out the underpass flooding down the road from me. One nice summary page with my local councilors, their contact details, a mug shot of them and their attendance record in Parliament (where relevant).

What I do like about FixMyStreet is the RSS feed for my local area and the summary page showing the problems reported. But why isn’t the date they were reported shown? Just how long have those bollards been missing ?

Over at EGov Monitor Stephen F. King writes about the problems with these types of sites :

eGov monitor - A Policy Dialogue Platform |

In order to evaluate the effectiveness of FMS to date, and its future potential, the views of a range of stakeholders were obtained: developers, local government officers responsible for e-government and customer services at two councils (Council A and Council B), and prospective users of the site.

Whilst FMS is very easy to use, and clearly popular with the prospective users surveyed, its impact to date has been somewhat limited. None of the prospective users had heard of the site, and only one of the five council officers interviewed had heard of it. We do not have figures for the total number of problems reported to Council A in the first year of FMS’ operation, but suspect that the 155 problems posted on the FMS site at the time of writing represent a very small proportion of these. The site needs more publicity. Not surprisingly, the local government officers interviewed voiced a number of concerns. The key concern was over the accuracy of the reports (from “bogus” posters?), and whether fixes were reported quickly by the site (or even reported at all). Because the local councils don’t own the site, they cannot get their messages across to the users, for example to explain why problems are not being fixed or to outline their future plans for the area. This is part of the management of expectations, which is seen as key by the councils – who also feel aggrieved that their good work is not being reflected in improved public esteem. Presumably a mechanism for enabling the council to post to FMS when a problem has been resolved from their point of view would be useful. This would provide the council with a “voice” in the process, without denying the citizen’s voice.

I hope that the people at FixMyStreet have taken notice of these comments. Not all of them I agree with but I believe that mySociety are the best people to make this work, the problems are not impossible to resolve and with enough people using the system councils can be encouraged to work with the system rather than against it.

Got a problem ? Get someone to FixMyStreet.