FixIt!
Citizen reporting in action.
The Story
FixIt! was an AquaLab project built around collaborative civic engagement, originally developed for the 2011 Apps for Metro Chicago competition. It allowed citizens to report broken streetlights, potholes, graffiti and other public property issues requiring city attention.
Once something was reported, FixIt! unobtrusively asked other users in the area to confirm or refute the request. The result was a curated, crowdsourced list of items for the city to act on — letting it dispatch personnel with more confidence that there was something to fix, and with a sense of which issues were affecting citizens most.
That confirmation step is the whole design. Collecting reports is easy; knowing which ones are real, which are duplicates, and which matter is the part that makes the data usable, and it is the same problem that shows up in crowdsourced network measurement, where one client’s view is cheap and unreliable and the value comes from reconciling many.
It took 5th place in the Apps 4 Metro Chicago Challenge, Community Round.
The App
Reporting, describing, and — the part that mattered — being asked to confirm somebody else’s report.
Related Work
FixIt! has no paper of its own. The research questions it touches are treated in our crowdsourcing work:
- Crowd (Soft) Control — HotMobile 2012
- No One-Size Fits All: Towards a Principled Approach for Incentives in Mobile Crowdsourcing — HotMobile 2014
People
Lead & PI
- Fabián E. Bustamante (Northwestern University)