After many years on Blogger, we have moved our company blog to a new space.

We hope you will continue to follow our journey and subscribe to our new blog!

On January 1 SeeClickFix and CTNext welcomed the first three SeeClickFix Fellows. Michael Kaufmann, Steven Young and Andrew Williams joined the SeeClickFix team for 6 months. During the day they work on the other side of the office from their core competencies, engineers working in biz dev and vice versa. At night they work on their products.

We are two months into the fellowship. There are 4 months left in the fellow's nights and weekend runway. After that they have been kindly offered a home at New Haven's co-working space, The Grove where they will likely continue to grow their products and figure out how to support themselves financially.

Andrew Williams hails from Virginia but now calls #NHV his home. Steven comes from San Francisco as Andrew's engineering half at http://www.PlacingLiterature.com. Placing Literature is a crowdsourcing website that maps literary scenes that take place in real locations.  There are 1350 places mapped in the first six months and their core focus during the fellowship is making the database more robust. This is the first time the founders are living in the same city while working on their startup.

Mike Kauffman is developing MoVi Interactive, an innovative tech firm specializing in wearable technology and the user experience. MoVi creates applications that leverage data captured by physical sensors such as Fitbit, Nike FuelBand and Jawbone Up- to name a few. The flagship application, Fitness Faceoff, is the first full-blown fitness strategy game and is set to release in March.
"Being a part of the SCF Fellowship program will give me an opportunity to learn from active and experienced entrepreneurs. Giving me insight into the day to day operations and what it takes to run a young company. When starting a new venture, you will quickly realize that everyday presents a new "monkey wrench" - it has been reassuring to know that I have access to advice and guidance." --Michael Kaufmann

We are loving the prototype designs of Fitness Faceoff at SCF and are excited to see the beta to be launched in March.

I came across this request in Holyoke yesterday, and wanted to share it as a great example of one of the thousands of positive customer experiences we see delivered by our municipal partners. Thanks for using SeeClickFix.

SeeClickFix just hosted a Kaggle competition to predict which 311 issues are most

important to citizens. Kaggle, an online platform that hosts data analytics competitions, offers

a place for companies to post their data online and present a challenge to solve. Kaggle’s

community of more than 100,000 data scientists browse these company competitions and mine

data to try and produce the best model in order to win.

So, what exactly makes these data scientists so special? Software Advice, a website that

reviews business intelligence tools, analyzed the top 100 Kaggle prize-winners to get a better

understanding of what these data gurus have in common. Below are some of the top findings.

Time in school and performance in data competitions have a direct correlation. More than 80

percent of the top 100 performers on Kaggle have a Master’s degree or higher.

Computer science and mathematics are the main areas of study by the top Kaggle performers.

However, engineering, econometrics and statistics were close behind. While most of these

areas of study complement a career in data analytics, a few surprising programs surfaced, such

as philosophy and law. The idea being that the characteristics and skills needed to excel as a

data scientist aren’t necessarily tied to a specific background.



The See, Click, Predict, Fix competition had 313 teams competing for a chance to

make a positive social change in the world (and gain some extra cash!).

And the winners are...

• José A. Guerrero - Sevilla, Spain, with this model approach and code

• Bryan Gregory - Fort Worth, USA  and
• Miroslaw Horbal - Waterloo, Canada, with this model approach and code

• James Petterson - Sydney, Australia, with this model approach and code 

• Anqi W. - Troy, NY, USA, for Views by Source. East

• Ran Locar - Tel Aviv, Israel, for Who Works When?

In support of Open Data Day, SeeClickFix and Socrata are collaborating to provide the SeeClickFix Socrata Download tool through February 24, 2014. We are excited to see how participants use and visualize the data in new and different ways.

A number of folks are hosting International Open Data Day around the world and we're excited to be the host in our home town of #NHV.

The SeeClickFix API is available at http://dev.seeclickfix.com. We've heard ideas for building apps like Snowcrew.org on top of the API that lend context to certain types of service requests. We've also heard ideas for location aware apps that react to SeeClickFix data. In the past we have seen predictive algorithms and visualizations and we hope that we see more of these as well. In one case we have even seen an entire mobile application with near feature parody to in-house SeeClickFix apps built in Romania.

If you are near New Haven and have technical chops join us this Saturday.
Details here:

• Tell a friend 
• Share

Last week Ben Schiller at Fast Company interviewed us about some of our favorite issues from 2013.
Check it out!

We are pleased to announce that our latest municipal partner is the Town of Surfside, Florida! They're rolling out our hosted government CRM platform to departments across the board, from Public Works, to Parks and Recreation, to Code Compliance.

Sunny weather, sandy beaches, and now SeeClickFix: Surfside, what's not to like?

We look forward to partnering with other cities, towns, and villages in Miami-Dade County in 2014.

Last week Snowcrew.org launched in private beta with newly knighted Yetis signing on their friends and neigbors to volunteer shoveling assistance to the elderly, injured and disabled.

The day after Snowcrew went into private beta Yetis were called into action in New Jersey. Nancy Tilford asked for help shoveling in Sussex County. Seven Yetis rushed to her and her husband's aid validating the Snowcrew platform and prompting the tool out of private beta into beta. There are still known bugs that the Snowcrew team is squashing but you can start growing your grew. 374 Yetis have signed up in the last few days and today Snowcrew announces its beta launch.

If you are physically unable to shovel and need assistance please sign-up for Snowcrew to request assistance from a neighbor. If you want to help out today in the storm you can bring up Snowcrew.org and find requests nearby from neighbors who need a hand. Every new user is given an ordered Yeti id and a referral link that you can share to help build your crew. More features to come but Snowcrew hopes you enjoy this early release.

We're very excited about this civic expansion on top of the SeeClickFix platform. If you want to build an app on top of the SeeClickFix API contact us and we'll help you get started.

The New Haven Register has a bit more of the Story on Snowcrew thanks to Helen Harvey, Staff Writer at the Register.

This week Sacramento 311 announced their new mobile app provided by SeeClickFix. The solution provides for different service request types based on the geo-dynamic location of the report. This gives the county flexibility in their service request offering that they didn't have previously.

Their press release is here: http://www.saccounty.net/news/latest-news/Pages/311.aspx

The press has has already picked up on the story: http://www.lodinews.com/news/article_9bdfb9a9-e869-582e-a2dc-5d926ec5779a.html

itunes download

android download

If you have not yet seen our 2013 Year in Review Check it out:

New Haven, Conn., January 15th, 2014 - Today, SeeClickFix released a native app for Android that allows citizens to report neighborhood issues--such as potholes, graffiti and burned-out streetlights--and engage with their neighbors and the government officials responsible for fixing/addressing these issues. 

"The Android extension has become a top priority over the past six months due to consumer and government behavior on the platform," said Ben Berkowitz, CEO, SeeClickFix. "We've seen from our users that local government employees are more likely to be carrying a government issued smartphone or tablet, with many on the Android OS. We saw issues created by government officials increase by 600 percent in 2013, indicating that smartphone reporting apps are becoming a popular medium for increasing municipal productivity and citizen engagement."




Android App Eases User Experience The new SeeClickFix Android app is designed to make it easy to report, comment, track and share issues in your neighborhood — bringing the performance, speed and aesthetic of top-performing consumer apps to the government engagement platform. Among the core features of the application:

• Users have access to an infinite scrolling list of issues documented in their community—complete with photos, location and the ability to comment and support existing issues. Government users can acknowledge and close out issues that they have worked on from the field.

• When documenting a new issue a user's location is determined by GPS and they are walked through an intuitive issue reporting form determined by the responding agency in their community. Photos and videos can be added from the camera or gallery to illuminate the issue.  

• Once an issue has been submitted, it is routed based on request type and keywords to the appropriate agency. Responses from the agency and others are then documented on the issue and pushed back to the user.

SeeClickFix serves as an unofficial channel for citizens and governments to communicate in more than 10,000 communities around the world.  In the past few years the platform has also become the official service request platform for local governments serving over 25 million individuals.  Official city partners include Washington DC; Houston, Texas; San Francisco, CA; Oakland, CA; Sacramento County and The Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The new Android application is available for download here.