On June 5th of this year SCF user 'beautify' was the first to click the newly released "Thank You" button upon the clean-up of a large pile of illegally dumped material in the city of Oakland.  Yet to be exposed in the API, the widgets or the mobile apps the "Thank You" button currently exists on the SCF website. On Thanksgiving there are now 6,000 thank you's that have been sent to public officials and others who have helped to fix issues around the world.  

Just yesterday I clicked "Thank You" when awesome neighbors and SCF power user Juli helped return a lost puppy home the day before Thanksgiving.

The "Thank You" button appears in place of the vote button when issues are resolved and on Fridays the platform sends a condensed email of all the Thank You's that the fixer has received for that week.

Here's all of the fixed issues in the United States if you want to spend some time thanking Public Officials today.

Happy Thanksgiving and Thank You!

Hi, my name is Tucker Severson. I am the newest member of the SeeClickFix sales team.

I spent the past four years in Burlington VT, where I initially designed, built and ran a German restaurant named “Das Bierhaus” at the bottom of Church Street. If you are ever in the Burlington area, make sure you check out its rooftop biergarten! I spent the second two years in VT working as a director at the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies (VCET) — a state funded seed capital and startup incubator. I have a BA from Bates College and an MBA from the University of Vermont.

I am thrilled to be a part of the team at SeeClickFix. This is a really exciting time for our municipal partners and the citizens that they serve. Government transparency, citizen engagement and flexible web technologies are transforming the way democracy is being served across the country and I feel lucky to be a part of this incredibly powerful trend. I especially look forward to learning from our government partners and lending a hand as they build the next generation of civic communication.

If you have any questions about how SeeClickFix can help your community, don't hesitate to reach out to tucker@seeclickfix.com.

Over the weekend two volunteers, Nick and Andria, along with myself went out to a location in New Haven where there is lower usage on SeeClickFix. Our strategy was to use a campaign technique where we asked folks on the street what they wanted fixed in the neighborhood. We then offered the solution of reporting the issue on SeeClickFix as opposed to a candidate to vote for.

The first person we ran into knew all about SeeClickFix and could have been an evangelist herself. We probably should have recruited her to our team. The next few folks did not know about SeeClickFix but we were able to report a few issues for them and add them as followers on the issues.

We have already started talking to the next Mayor of New Haven's transition team about focusing on larger user adoption locally. In the meantime local volunteers are seeing the difference that SCF makes in neighborhoods with large adoption and getting the word-out.

If you want to Join Nick and Andria at 4:30 today or in the future come to the SCF office or sign-up here:

Take a look at Ben's most recent interview with a North Carolina SeeClickFix-er on Medium. You can find additional interviews on Ben's Medium profile.

A farewell to SeeClickFix's first home-base administration:

As Mayor Destefano's Administration prepares to leave office a legacy of open governance and accountability will be left for future administrations and citizens of New Haven as well as other parts of the world that have made use of the software that they have guided in development.

Chief Administrative Officer Robert Smuts, Ethan Hutchings, Evan Trachten, Kathy Hurley, Jennifer Pew, Jim Travers, Mike Piscitelli, Chief Esserman and many more City officials have equally been responsible for driving much of the back-end workflow management and reporting software that helps the City of New Haven better respond to its citizens and measure its own performance.

The City of New Haven was one of the first cities to react proactively to citizen reports generated on SeeClickFix. As opposed to treating the added feedback loop as a painful disruption, City Hall took it as an opportunity to improve its internal processes as well as their external communication. Bureaucracy is slow to change to protect its citizens from single-serving and risky decisions but it does not need to when citizens show up in mass looking to help make that change together.

The City of New Haven was not only keen to use the tool to hold themselves accountable but also to hold accountable and ask for assistance from other agencies and individuals.   Regional Water Authority, United Illuminating, AT&T and Southern CT Gas have all responded to issues because of the City's leadership and routing of those issues on the platform. Yale University's Police Department and the New Haven Police Department have also used the platform to receive communication and provide feedback.  Southern CT State University has been encouraged to use the platform for their students and visitors to the campus. Central Animal Hospital has been using the platform to reconnect neighbors with lost pets taking some burden off the City. Most importantly because they were the very first to work with SeeClickFix the Town Green Special Services District uses the platform to divide and respond to issues in downtown that they deem fixable without City Hall's help. On top of the downtown SSD the various neighborhood associations and block watches that have reported issues for a large group of folks have all come to the table to discuss openly the improvement of our City with our City Hall.  Many Aldermen have started communicating openly on SeeClickFix with their citizens as well. Most recent of note including Alderpersons Doug Hausladen, Justin Elicker and Jessica Holmes. As well as State Senator Roland Lemar who was one of the first Aldermen to communicate on the platform.  Most recently CT Transit has followed the Yale Shuttle's lead and has started responding to reports about public transportation.

And then there are all of the citizens of NHV who came to the table not only to tell City Hall what was wrong but to offer to help when they realized that the City was listening to them.  The urban resources initiative and its volunteers documented hundreds of completed beautification projects and tree plantings and leveraged the the tool to bring more volunteers to the table.  Claudia Herera in Fair Haven translated promotional materials into Spanish to help get out the word to her neighbors that there was a new way to communicate with City Hall and the City never overlooked the valuable feedback of the site's most prolific users Mark Abraham and Brian Tang.

Most importantly there has been the additional oversight and coverage of the conversation and data by news platforms New Haven Independent and the New Haven Register who have launched SeeClickFix with all of its papers around the Country.  As well as the web exposure by organizations like Lee Cruz and Chatham Square Neighbors and local broadcast journalists at WTNH Erin Cox, Chris Velardi and Ann Nyberg.

The City of New Haven used a platform that could allows others to help them maintain the public space because without that help they would not have been able to maintain the quality of that great and aging resource.  The citizens of New Haven have continued to step up while passively agreeing to deal with beta versions of many SeeClickFix features as well as the occasional (more than occasional?) victims of too much email.  The City is currently working with SeeClickFix to tie into the back-office software for the building department as well as beta testing an open knowledge base for City Hall and citizens. Volunteers are also meeting to help spread the word to low use neighborhoods.

SeeClickFix was modeled here in New Haven and we're thankful and proud of that every day.

Our goal is to work with the City of New Haven to reach every neighbor and help them drive the direction of the City while giving them easy access to hear from the City and their neighbors. Much of the hard internal work has been done at City Hall to help officials respond efficiently and 13,000 neighbors have been connected. Now the hard work starts to get everyone else to the table. We're looking forward to working with the next administration in welcoming many more voices.

The current state of all SeeClickFix service requests in the past few years to City Hall are below. This does not include requests on SeeClickFix for help from neighbors or other parts of the community such as finding a lost pet. Roll over the sections to see the scale.

SeeClickFix Government Partnership Manager Ryan Mannion and I are both at the National League of Cities Congress of Cities and Exposition in Seattle, WA today and tomorrow! If you or any representatives from your municipality are attending the conference, please be sure to stop by booth #915 and say hello!

Our booth is directly between two street lamp and traffic sign vendors. You literally cannot miss us!

We're looking forward to meeting you, learning about your city's CRM needs, and showing you some of the innovative ways SeeClickFix clients have been using our platform!

A recent study in New Haven showed that SCF reports are inverse to crime. This has inspired a few folks to attempt to drive up SCF usage in these higher crime communities to see if there is any correlation in the increase in reports to the decrease in crime.  While we're not naive to think that poverty, lack of education, drugs, gangs and the other usual suspects of contributing factors to high crime neighborhoods are going to magically go away, we would also be naive to think that better communication might not help improve things.

On Thursday at 6:30 PM all are welcome to a working session to help get out the word about SCF in neighborhoods where reporting is lower than average across the City of New Haven.  If you're a marketing guru, campaign master, designer or a behavioral psychologist this would be a great place for you. As always engineers and programmers are always welcome too.

Here's the event if you'd like to add it to your calendar:

Please RSVP Here:

The Commonwealth Connect app continues to grow and receive attention from the press and new users alike. Yesterday, we launched a new Commonwealth Connect website to highlight early successes 

It has been exciting to see the use of open data in the local press in stories like this one and this one, and to see Seattle's former CTO recommend a program similar to Commonwealth Connect. 

For help with data inquiries email contact@seeclickfix.com.

"SeeClickFix began to engage this small army of Guerrilla Citizens improving the City."

Click the gear to see the presenter notes.

This past year we have seen a number of interesting trends with our partner cities. The most intriguing, from my point of view, is the rapid adoption of our "City Initiated" functionality released earlier this year. Traditionally our platform has been focused on initiating a transparent communication loop when a citizen submits a new service request to the city. While the citizen created reports are still core to what we do they only tell half the story.

The other half, is represented through service requests created by city employees. We are seeing a rapidly increasing trend of city initiated service requests on SeeClickFix, depicting an unprecedented level of commitment by city administrations to make data more open and accessible.



Recently I was chatting with Kam Lasater, our Co-founder and CSO, about the core concepts that built SCF for a proposal I was working on. He explained our approach this way,


I think this concisely summarizes what we are trying to achieve. By encouraging city staff to report on the same platform their citizens are using we build an even deeper level of transparency into the process. The fact that SeeClickFix is built with both the city employee and the citizen equally in mind still strikes me as one of our more unique qualities. Both play integral roles in the success of a city, so facilitating an open and accountable communication is only natural.

"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody"

- Jane Jacobs, 

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

As you could imagine, overlapping seven years of crime incident reports and SeeClickFix service requests in the city of New Haven yielded some interesting results. The map below was generated by DataHaven for a presentation this week at the latest in a series of Civic Hack Meet-up hosted by SeeClickFix.

Wilson and Kelling published their famous "Broken Windows" theory back in March 1982, which suggests there is a direct correlation between urban disarray and crime. After conducting a number of interesting social experiments (in both the Bronx and Palo Alto) they go on to state that maintaining and monitoring urban environments can play a key role in curbing the escalation of vandalism into more serious crime. Seven years worth of data seems to suggest a similar pattern.

http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/_atlantic_monthly-broken_windows.pdf