Just in time for the holiday’s the CitySourced app is here! Now you can do some good this season and help clean up your neighborhood, and it only takes a couple of minutes and an iPhone.
Here’s how it works. You know that pothole your car keeps falling into as you try and pull into your driveway? CitySourced can help with that. All you do is pull out your iPhone, snap a pic, select the report type and hit send. CitySourced will geo-tag your picture and send a PDF report to the city council member that handles that district. Neat!
And it’s not just for help with potholes, there’s a whole slew of items that you can tag and report:
- abandoned bicycle or vehicle
- animal services – biting, deceased, not leashed, not permitted, pest control
- driveway cleaning, danger, degradation, obstruction
- graffiti removal
- homeless encampment, nuisance
- illegal dumping/trash, fire/burning
- leaf collection
- parking illegally, illegally in driveway, in red zone, without permit
- parking meter broken, parking sign
- plants/trees danger, degradation, obstruction, overgrown, removal
- roadway cleaning, danger, degradation, obstruction
- sidewalk cleaning, danger, degradation, obstruction
- street light, sign
- trash can/bin broken, removal
- water leak driveway, fire hydrant, sidewalk, street, unknown
- yard waste removal
- other including building code enforcement, noise complaint, property violation, any not listed
I recently tested it out with some graffiti I spotted on the street. Some jokester thought it would be cool to tag the word “sean”.
I loaded up CitySourced on my iPhone
The app asked if it could use my location. (you must say yes for the app to continue)
Snapped a pic of the offending graffiti
Selected the type of report appropriate for the offense
Then hit submit. The report shows that is it processing and after a few short minutes you can go into the My Reports section and see your report.
Currently there are over 1900 cities in the database and users have the ability to add a city from the CitySourced website. The app is free to download and according to Kurt Daradics, Co-Founder of CitySourced, the way they plan to make money is off of the individual cities.
San José is the first city to sign up. By paying for the service, they can consume the data being reported in a more direct way. For instance my graffiti report would not be lumped in with all other reports in one big PDF file, it would go directly to the person in charge of handling graffiti complaints. By paying for the service, the reports that are coming in are streamlined and go directly to the person who can quickly and effectively handle the complaint.
Check it out and let us know what you think in the comments.
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