App aims to be more than a ‘quick fix’

Friday, March 15, 2013

Jonathan deBurca Butler is impressed when he sees the results of fixmyarea.com, as his complaint prompts a quick response.

VISIT Wilson’s Place off Mount St in Dublin 2 on any given day and you can be almost sure of finding bags of rubbish heaped in a corner.

Having lived around this area for many years, I had a suspicion this would be as good a place as any to start testing out my new app — FixMyArea.com. I arrived at Wilson’s Place and I wasn’t disappointed. Rubbish lay strewn everywhere. I took a photo of the mess and uploaded it onto FixMyArea.com. The website then sent me an acknowledgement of my report and said that it would be looked into. Three days later I returned and sure enough the rubbish was gone and my FixMyArea account had been updated to say that the problem had been resolved. Suitably impressed, I decided to try again and the results were the same.

The concept is simple. A person takes a photo of a problem such as graffiti or rubbish and uploads it onto the website. FixMyArea.com passes the problem onto the suitable council who then come and fix it.

“There are always lots of issues wherever you live,” says Mike Brennan of FixMyArea. “But I suppose the inherent difficulties with reporting are that firstly people need to know what area they’re in, then who the right person to contact is, the right department and so on. So what we’re doing is allowing people to submit the information to the council in a very elegant and accurate fashion. Digging around for phone numbers, e-mail addresses… you might have all the best intentions in the world but there are barriers there. We take all that hard work out of it. All you have to do is have the app on your phone and away you go.”

The main advantage of the app and its mother site is its speed and accuracy. Since being launched by Locate Online Ltd in July of last year, FixMyArea.com has received 27,947 issues.

“We’ve tried to make it as user friendly as possible,” says Brennan. “We’ve harnessed the power of more modern browsers, androids and i-Phones to actually detect exactly where you are so that we can get the location of the problem as accurate as possible. We use a process called reverse geocoding so we take the latitude and longitude, which obviously gives a position on the map but we also make it more human by giving it a meaningful postal address, so to speak. In that way the council have all the information they require, along with the photo to be able to go and solve the issue; whether it be a pothole or graffiti or, as in your case, rubbish.”

The problems are posted publicly on the site which means that there is no way of ignoring them. And because it connects to Facebook and Twitter, you can let neighbours and friends know what is happening in your area — and theirs. As Brennan points out, for groups such as residents’ committees and tidy towns’ committees, the site is a Godsend.

Every local council in the country is now using the site and the service is fully automated, thereby reducing emails to and from middle men. “The councils have responded very positively really,” says Brennan. “Obviously it makes it easier for the user to report the problem, so I’d say they’re getting a lot more reports than they previously did, but for them they can send back comments through their system to the user and so it’s a nice little bit of PR; to say ‘yes we’re here, we’re on hand for all these issues’ so it’s a good tool for them.”

But really in essence what this is all about, from the point of view of the council, is that mapping allows the councils to work more efficiently, says Brennan. “They can see what areas are most problematic and therefore concentrate their resources rather than just looking at them on a case-by-case basis. So if they see that there are three or four reports in one area, they’ll send a litter warden or an engineer out to that area that day. Mapping really helps to put it into a spatial context for the council.”

So now that Ireland has been cracked, are there plans to fix my world?

“The response has been great here,” says Brennan. “We’re very much an Irish company and we wanted to make it work in our own back garden before we went anywhere else. Having said that, the UK is definitely on the agenda.”

* www.fixmyarea.com Home