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Power to the people, new mobile app for good Samaritans

By Vince Thompson | Nov 5, 2009 |

We love our cities and so do the people who work in our city governments. However…given the complexity of city issues, lack of resources and multiple communication paths its sometimes easy to feel that we are living on different planes.

One hot new start up seeks to change all that and is generating a good deal of buzz. CitySourced makes available an Iphone application (soon on Palm and other devices) that allows citizens to identify graffiti, potholes and other examples of urban blight and then share the info with those in their city responsible for the fix. The process is simple. See an abandoned couch in front of your apartment building? Open the CitySourced app, take a quick picture, enter any comments and hit send. The picture along with your comments and GPS coordinates goes right to the city.

Having just recently take the runner up position at the prestigious TechCrunch 50, CitySourced capitalizes on the real-time, mobile, social opportunities presented in our Monday post with Scott Snyder.

View CitySourced’s founder Jason Kiesel at TechCrunch 50 and hear what the companies first customer from the City of San Jose has to say.

To Learn More about CitySourced, Click Here

 
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  •  
    1

    kennyzd

    11/05/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Power to the people, new mobile app for good Samaritans

    Where's the app? It's not in the app store/

  •  
    2

    kennyzd

    11/05/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Power to the people, new mobile app for good Samaritans

    Where's the app? It's not on the app store.

  •  
    3

    Jen_McFadden

    11/08/09 | Report as spam

    RE: Power to the people, new mobile app for good Samaritans

    Vince/Melanie,
    You should also check out SeeClickFix.com. They have been up and running for a little over a year. and have a great site that is particularly compelling, from both a content and revenue perspective, for local publishers/bloggers. The tool allows citizens to report community concerns like potholes to public officials and have conversations around bigger issues like traffic calming and blighted neighborhoods. SeeClickFix launched in 25,000 towns last week and released a new Text-Widget to partner with their existing Map Widget for hyper-local sites. (see: http://seeclickfix.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-com...).

    SeeClickFix is being used by media partners such as The New York Times, Philly.com, and Gannett's newly-launched InJersey sites to create not only a hub for community engagement, but also as a source generator for stories. In New Haven, reporters for the New Haven Independent and The New Haven Register used it to find sources for a story on illegal ATVs on city streets (http://seeclickfix.blogspot.com/2009/04/illegal...). Also, David Cohn from Spot.us used it to scope out potholes in Oakland (http://spot.us/pitches/147/posts/16 and http://seeclickfix.blogspot.com/2009/05/communi...). This led to a story by Spot.us that was funded by The Tribune.

    Journalists can create watch areas that can be used to source stories in their coverage areas (http://bit.ly/slAsa). City officials can create watch areas to find out what their constituency is concerned about and non-profit organizations can embed the SeeClickFix widget into their websites to provide an additional way to engage with their volunteers and donors.

    SeeClickFix has even gone international and is being used in Terni, Italy! http://seeclickfix.blogspot.com/
    Best,
    Jennifer

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Christina Hernandez

Christina Hernandez is an award-winning journalist based in the Philadelphia area. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Philadelphia Inquirer, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, the website of the Columbia Journalism Review and elsewhere. Christina is a graduate of the University of Delaware and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

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Christina Hernandez is an independent journalist whose reporting and observations are not influenced by financial holdings.

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Melanie D.G. Kaplan is a veteran journalist, traveler and swimmer. She writes regularly for The Washington Post and is a contributing editor at Washington Flyer. She has also written for The New York Times, National Geographic Traveler, People and USA Weekend. Melanie is a graduate of Syracuse University and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her beagle Darwin.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan

In addition to working as a journalist, Melanie keeps the dog food fund flush with occasional consulting jobs. In the unusual event that her writing mentions a company or organization for which she has provided editorial services, she will disclose that fact. She will do the same should she cover any companies in which she holds investments.

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