Craig Newmark, one of the Godfathers of social networking technologies (also known as the founder of Craigslist.com) used SeeClickFix to report an issue in his hometown of San Francisco.

Using the SeeClickFix mobile web application he reported his issue regarding excessive heat on a public train, and within a week received notification from the city of San Francisco that they were working on the problem.

CNN.com reported about Newmark using the SeeClickFix tool and noted that the technology, GOV 2.0, is a huge part of a new era where public service is no longer a laundry list of to-dos but an interactive world where citizens have more control over what gets done because they are a part of the solution.

As we bid farewell to a decade of all types of new technological advances, it’s nice to know that SeeClickFix is coming out as a leader of a better tomorrow.

Read the whole CNN.com story here.

A Chattanooga, TN, hyperlocal news website, chattarati.com, has recently added SeeClickFix to their neighborhood blogs.

Editor, John Hawbaker sees the SeeClickFix tool as an extension of the goal of his websites: to engage Chattanooga citizens with the community around them.

In St. Elmo, a neighborhood around Chattanooga, Hawbaker reported on chattarati.com about local people creating homemade signs encouraging drivers to slow down.

There’s no doubt that SeeClickFix will become a vital tool for the already engaged citizens of Chattanooga while also offering additional support to help connect citizens to government.

STAND, a community visioning effort led by residents across the Chattanooga region helped to bring awareness of SeeClickFix to the area.

Their active role in introducing us to the Chattanooga community has led to sites like chattarati.com embracing SeeClickFix and overall civic engagement with the tool.

And lastly, Liz Henley, Chattanooga 311 Call Center Coordinator, has been working tirelessly to address the concerns of citizens in her city.

Ms. Henley swiftly managed a blighted property concern in Chattanooga.

She was able to conduct a dialogue with a concerned citizen while also facilitating the process of figuring out when the blighted property would be demolished. The original thought was that the property would be evaluated in February 2010, but a concerned citizen noted that the danger of the property far outweighed the benefit of keeping it. Just a handful of days later, the issue was closed with this joyous remark from the initial citizen reporter: “Demolished! Thank you very, very much!”

Our thanks to Ms. Henley and the citizen reporter and a huge thanks to STAND and chattarati.com for spreading the word about how SeeClickFix is a great tool for the big picture of civic engagement.

As we brace for yet another bout with Mother Nature, we wanted to take a moment to thank the city for doing a great job of cleaning up our streets after Saturday night’s deluge of snow.

Areas, that residents felt weren’t attended to, were quickly fixed through notification by reporters on SeeClickFix and the diligence of the Livable Cities Initiative. Check out the progress of this issue.

In the future, we’d like to remind reporters that SeeClickFix is also a good place to remind your neighbors of sidewalks that need shoveling in your living area. It’s also a way for neighbors to help neighbors — especially those that may not be able to shovel snow themselves. Cleaning up a city after a big snowstorm is both the responsibility of our government and the good neighborly thing for everyone to do.
So shovels ready? Before we know it, we’ll be waist deep again…

We just got a very nice Happy Holidays and thank you for SCF from a block watch using SeeClickFix,

"Hello Ben,

Members of Greenwich Ave. Block Watch 403 asked me to send you a note --
To Thank You for all you've done with SCF also to wish you and yours the HAPPIEST and MERRIEST of Holidays.
HAPPY and MERRY BEN!!!!!

Peace
kris"

This reminds me to thank everyone who has used, contributed to and advised us over the last year. We are truly grateful for your help and use of the tool and the timing and cultural climate that has allowed SeeClickFix to flourish over the last year.

Happy Holidays to all!

SeeClickFix Team

Last week, SeeClickFix had the pleasure of partnering with media outlet Savannahnow.com , in Savannah, Georgia.

Before Savannahnow took the SeeClickFix widget live, their city map was relatively dark with just a handful of issues being reported by citizens.
In a matter of days, the map began to grow and issues like potholes and spilled commercial waste began populating the area.

Then, a few days ago, eight concerned citizens (and counting) stepped up to say they were unhappy about a dangerous bike path. Soon, following the concern, watch areas were created around this bike path for City Council as the city had not yet responded.
But, perhaps the best news from our new partner came in a matter of two hours of an issue being opened.

Concerned about a broken water line cover that was causing cars to get stuck on the road, a concerned citizen reported to SeeClickFix as first-time user and waited to see if and when something would be done.

Two hours later the poster typed, "OMG - it actually works!! in less than 2 hours there is a city worker checking out the problem!! Thank you so much for this tool! KUDOS!"
Issue Closed! A KUDOS back at ya Savannah Citizen without your report, SeeClickFix would not work the way it does.

This seems to be the start of more good things to come for Savannah.

(Guest post by Doug Hardy from the Journal Inquirer)

There is a tremendous role for SeeClickFix at every local newspaper. At the Journal Inquirer we're scratching the surface by using local SeeClickFix reports as story topics and also as a way to develop new sources. I've become something like a consumer advocacy columnist, but it's more like a "homeowner" or "resident" or even a "taxpayer" advocacy columnist. We found that there is real interest in this stuff. I've gotten more responses on my first 8 or 9 SeeClickFix columns than on anything else I've ever done in journalism. It's been fun getting back out into the field.

We haven't completely carried this through to its conclusion yet as a circulation booster or revenue generator. But I'm working on those final steps with our ad people and circulation department.

Why is this valuable? Does it fit with our mission? I won't belabor the overarching truth of the print news industry's situation ... but my assessment of the JI's problems is simple: we're losing core readers with every obit we publish, and we're not adding new readers. We're nowhere near as interactive as we can be. We're losing print advertisers and we're not gaining online advertisers. We're an old product in a new world. Essentially, for a long time we had been putting our print product up on the Web, as is. It's not very interesting to a Web user.

On coverage choices, we're stuck in a local politics rut. Most people don't care about local politics at all, even during election season, but it remains the focus of our coverage. We cover the budget process to death. We tailor our coverage to "locals" but we're tailoring it only to locals who care about, or who are involved in, local gov't. That's no longer good enough. We won't abandon that coverage, but SeeClickFix is a way to insert the JI into neighborhood conversations again and to make us interactive.



When people bump into each other as they walk their dogs, what do they talk about? Potholes, graffiti, speeders, eyesore properties, etc.

I want those people to say, "Hey, I reported that graffiti on SeeClickFix.com and the guy from the JI wrote a story about it, and then the town came out and cleaned it up." So it's true that on some level this is marketing as well as journalism. We're basically trying everything now, within reason, to see what will get people to subscribe. The goal is to improve both our print and online product as inexpensively as possible, and to make them work together rather than undercut each other.

I'd heard about SeeClickFix early on when the New Haven Independent started using it. I kept an eye on it and it really does empower readers to clean up their neighborhoods. Last year I built a JI-Land map on the SeeClickFix site. And then I let it sit for a while. There was maybe a single report in our map when I built it.

Then the Hartford Courant published a story about SeeClickFix's early success as a startup - and basically notified everyone in our region about this new online tool. The day the Courant's story ran, I started receiving emails from new SeeClickFix users who were posting issues within our JI-Land map.

But I began communicating with the people reporting stuff in JI-Land and we eventually added the widget to our home page. We got a SeeClickFixPro account (for $38/month) to better brand everyone with a red JI on my messages. I keep handy our annual Discovery section (with phone numbers for all of our town officials), and started directing people to the departments and staff who could solve their problems, making it as easy as possible for them.

The SeeClickFix widget allows people to report stuff right there on the JI's Web site, and we get that traffic. They can click all the way through to the SeeClickFix site, but it's a good widget that does help keep traffic on our site and can be sized pretty much however you need it.

Pretty soon I was shooting photos and writing columns for print about the issues people were reporting. I posted links to my copy on SeeClickFix to prompt people to subscribe, even if only for 24 hours of access through our paywall, to read what I wrote about their problem. I don't know if that worked, but it was worth trying.

One of our towns requested a meeting with us because they felt that the JI was making it seem like we were responding on their behalf. They wanted us to direct people to their online Citizen Request System, which is great but offers no public comment. We showed the town how to build their own map and now they get notifications and post their own links to their Web site on the issues reported there. We're working with them, rather than against, and believe me they seem to be quickly responding to every SeeClickFix complaint on which I post a comment.

Truth is, a lot of the time town officials simply don't know there's a new pothole or whatever. They just need to be informed and the JI is playing a role in that notification. When I comment on an issue, the town knows we're watching and they know they have to respond or face negative publicity. When I do write for print, we've been starting the columns on Page 1 and that seems to help.

I wrote about an algae-covered pond in a public park in Windsor, and as it turned out the town was about to dredge it anyway. We got the town of Vernon to start the clean-up process on a foreclosed house and yard, and the town got the bank that owned the house to finish the job (as the bank is supposed to do anyway). And then we did 3 or 4 pieces on speeding issues throughout our area. We published a picture of a woman's cat, which had been killed, and I was flooded with emails and phone calls at my desk. We were then contacted by a guy with MS who is in a scooter and has to wear an orange vest and lights to get across the street safely in Windsor Locks. He even added 8-foot orange flags to his scooter to ensure he isn't struck in the crosswalk or in a parking lot. Really compelling stuff.

In South Windsor, people were fed up waiting for the completion of a bridge and we had quite a dialogue about that construction process. People thought the project was abandoned when the workers were off-site, fabricating large pieces.

In another town, an historic mill building is a terrible, empty eyesore and there's been plenty of dialogue on it. The mayor appears to have been sitting on information about the ongoing process of obtaining multiple permits for the building's redevelopment -- controlling information. I'm told that he even threatened a council member with an ethics complaint for bringing up questions about the mill building during a council meeting. He really didn't want the info out there, or so it seemed. But local residents started the dialogue about the mill online, and I responded with a few thoughts and links to background info from the JI's archives. Within 24 hours the mayor responded to me by email and both the developer and town administrator posted public responses about the status of the redevelopment. Good stuff. It's important to note that this is a mayor who has basically stopped communicating with the reporter we'd assigned to the town.

Frankly, I think every reporter who covers a community should be using SeeClickFix, but so far it's just me and one other reporter at the JI, and I'm on the layout desk so it's tough to find the time to do this. You may want to approach it as a team project.

Our circulation director thinks our SeeClickFix coverage is a strong, new selling point for our newspaper. We're talking about adding it to our sales dialogue and maybe even offering a discount to new subscribers who find us through SeeClickFix by posting an issue - or something along those lines. If we add a hard code in our circulation database we can track the people who subscribe because of SeeClickFix.

Further, our circulation managers "sample" neighborhoods all the time - delivering papers for free for three weeks or a month to nonsubscribers. We're looking at ways to coordinate SeeClickFix coverage in those sampling areas to increase our yield when those same managers go door-to-door to try to pick up new subscribers. It'll be pretty powerful to say something like, "we're already looking out for your neighborhood - here's a story."

On sponsors ... we are adding a spot for an ad in the SeeClickFix tab on our home page. We're also planning an "eyesore" project, where I'll write about the worst eyesores in each of our 17 towns. Aside from print, we'll try to produce a short video story about each eyesore as well. Our advertising VP thinks he can sell that kind of package - a print ad for each story, a 5-second pre-roll commercial for each video, and maybe an overall sponsor for the SeeClickFix tab online. Potential advertisers can be any community-minded bank or other business, a local landscaping company, a muffler or tire shop, or even a community organization. We can try to sell to an umbrella sponsor or go town by town.
dhardy at journalinquirer dot com

The City Fix DC's blogger David Daddio has spent the past few months "testing" the power of SeeClickFix and has found it more than useful for his city, particularly, his neighborhood, Adams Morgan.

He notes in his post, three different instances where non-emergency issues were fixed through the help of SeeClickFix and local city officials.

Additionally, Daddio shows that the varying issues were fixed and subsequently closed with the help of multiple active city members working together including Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners, DDOT Council Members and Parks Department leaders.

It's a beautiful thing when SeeClickFix brings the community together and an even more beautiful thing when evidence of its effectiveness shows up on the streets of some one's neighborhood.

See the full post here.