Recently, this article caught our eye, because of its focus on the effort of techies affiliated with online retailer Zappos to rejuvenate Las Vegas. The company is moving its headquarters downtown, encouraging employees to live in the neighborhood, and working to lure other businesses to join it.

This sentence, describing Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh, was especially interesting to us:

“Indeed, the motivation for Hsieh's big bet comes from his long-held philosophy that serendipitous interactions, or what he likes to call spontaneous "collisions" between people, are what spark ideas and what facilitate relationships that lead to stronger ties -- and stronger ties lead to more ideas.”

It seems that Zappos and SeeClickFix share this common cause. We’re thrilled when citizens can use our site to address a particular issue that affects their community, like issue #152700 Blocked storm drain, which brought attention to a basic public service that needed to be restored. We also know that our platform can be used to foster the collisions that Hsieh is interested in, which will enrich the community ties in areas that use SeeClickFix. For instance, a group of users took to the site to express a desire for more dog friendly spaces in Issue #131594 New Haven’s Lack of Dog Parks. They even started to fundraise for the park by taking professional portraits of neighborhood dogs for a fee.

This is obviously a very exciting time for Las Vegas, but most communities don’t have access to the hundreds of millions of dollars that are being invested there. However, anyone with access to the web can log on to SeeClickFix, get connected with their neighbors, and express their desires for their community. 

We’re hoping that this will continue to lead to the sparks of inspiration and enhanced civic life that we’re trying to facilitate.