Re:The international open source alternative (Score 1)

You are right, thanks for the mention (I work for mySociety)! Except that I believe that that number is now up to ten. Perhaps interestingly, the software is flexible enough that it can also be repurposed for any purpose that needs reports to be a) geolocated and b) sent to a specific location which is dependent on the location plus the chosen category - see collideosco.pe, for example (for reporting cycle/traffic collisions and near misses), and it's also been used to report empty homes, to report medicine shortages in Indian clinics, and to report anti-social behaviour on public transport. The open source platform and documentation can be seen at fixmystreet.org. All the benefits mentioned above are correct, but when we talk about it, the main one is from the user's POV. Here in the UK, we have multi-tier councils, so one spot can be the responsibility of a town council, a county council, a borough council or a parish council - or more likely, they split the different types of problem between them, with say the country council fixing potholes and the borough council tending parks and open spaces. The average citizen might well know that their problem is for 'the council' to deal with, but they won't always know which council, and even if they do, it might require finding the right page deep within their website and then filling in a clunky form. With FixMyStreet all you have to know is the one URL, for any council in the country, and it tries to ask as few questions as possible while still getting all the vital information to the council. Councils are keen too, generally speaking, because reports submitted online require a lot less staff resource, and, if they use Open311 as mentioned above, the reports will be placed directly into their workflow. As a result, we also offer FixMyStreet as a commercial product for councils, the revenue for which goes to support our charitable work.