Over one year ago, the Patrick Administration, the City of Boston and SeeClickFix announced Commonwealth Connect, a program that allows municipalities and constituents in Massachusetts to communicate about and quickly resolve non-emergency issues.

The flexible nature of the SeeClickFix platform allows for an issue-management solution that is adaptable across municipal governments of varying sizes, locations and demographics. The small island and beach community of Nantucket has found the service to be equally, though differently, impactful as Randolph, a mid-sized city with a high number of city-initiated requests.

In reflection of the success of this program, I used Insight, a new, interactive reporting mechanism designed by SeeClickFix, to extract data and highlight a statewide victory. These numbers and graphs draw attention to high levels of engagement by both Massachusetts’ residents and city employees.

This chart represents issues reported by municipal employees and residents. The spike of issues reported during the summer months is indicative of the June 2013 launch. New issue creation tapered in the Fall, but have been on the rise this Winter. We saw a similar trend nationwide:

Number of Issues Reported by Month in 2013

Municipal governments have actively addressed a large portion of reported issues. The overall increase in closing issues echoes the increase of new reports.  Impressively, 86% of the nearly 17,000 issues reported through the program have been resolved.

Number of Issues Closed by Month in 2013

While many citizens are reporting new issues, even more are voting for existing issues, highlighting the power of transparent information and crowdsourcing:

Number of Votes per Year

Similarly, this transparency encourages open communication between residents and governments. This open communication is evident in the high number of comment creation – Over 39,000 comments have been made in just one year:

Comment Creation By Year

Click Here to Download the Full Report

We have been impressed by the results of this program and know that its success can be credited to many – the Patrick Administration, the City of Boston, the SeeClickFix team, and of course, the Massachusetts municipalities and residents. This is the first of the three-year grant, and we look forward to expanding and strengthening the Commonwealth Connect program in the subsequent years.