Ben Berkowitz had a problem. His block of State Street, an expanse of charming storefronts and wood-frame houses that stretches from the border of Yale’s campus into New Haven’s grittier East Rock neighborhood, kept getting hit with graffiti. The 31-year-old did everything a good citizen was supposed to do: He called the city. He left multiple voice mails. He urged his neighbor to speak up. Eventually, he founded the Upper State Street Association to foster neighborhood pride. But still, the spray paint lingered. “I was feeling that helplessness when you’ve left three messages, you don’t know what the resolution is going to be, and you don’t have a way to hold anyone accountable,” he says.
A programmer by trade, Berkowitz sought a technological outlet for his frustrations. What if reporting graffiti or a broken traffic light or a clogged storm drain was as easy as snapping a photo with your mobile phone? What if that report was sent directly to all the groups that might give a damn, including city hall, the police department, the local utility company, and the neighborhood watch? Even better, what if all your neighbors could see those nearby reports and lend their own voices to apply pressure and get problems fixed? His solution, SeeClickFix, launched in beta in March 2008.
This open 311 has transformed the dialogue between residents and government in New Haven. That spray paint on State Street is gone — and 2,700 other user-submitted community problems have been dealt with as well. New Haven’s mayor, John DeStefano Jr., notes that the system reduces departmental redundancies in tracking and fixing a problem. He asked the local Department of Transportation, Department of Public Works, and police department to respond to complaints logged via SeeClickFix. DeStefano is such a fan that he sent letters to 100 U.S. mayors, urging them to consider the system.
“I had a Google alert on ‘pothole’ for awhile,” says Berkowitz. “I always say that potholes are the gateway drug to civic engagement.” SeeClickFix now operates in thousands of communities, from the usual suspects like San Francisco and Washington, D.C., to Dallas, Detroit, and smaller towns across Connecticut and western Massachusetts. Hundreds of thousands of people have participated; this October, there were 61,000 active issues on the site. In Boston, which built its own SeeClickFix-like platform, people can send concerns straight from their mobile phones to the dashboard computers of public-works trucks, meaning a click in the morning can lead to a repair by the afternoon.
