FixMyStadt 2.0

Potholes, graffiti or burned out lamps: everyone has seen such nuisances in public spaces. If there were only a way to let the right people in local government know! With Mashup technologies and mobile applications, the right solution can be delivered quickly. Information from citizens is added to the data of the local authorities and business. Everyone thus benefits from the resulting information.

In the scope of this project, Fraunhofer FOKUS demonstrates the potential of Mashups to meet the requirements of the public sector. At the same time, the requirements that go along with this, such as structured information from governmental authorities are researched and processed. The results are presented in the form of a Demonstrator and specifications and studies are published.

Mashups in the Public Sector

When speaking of Government Mashups we are talking about the Mashup principle being applied to the public sector or the data of the public sector. Some examples of this include the combination and visualization of various promotional materials or supplementing restaurant reviews with the results of governmental hygiene inspections. Currently there are a number of identifiable trends, which support the concept of Government Mashups. Technologically the Web is increasingly being perceived as a platform, which serves as the basis for developing applications such as Mashups. Legally, for some time, there are a number of existing laws at all levels of government including the Federal, State (Bundesland) and EU which, though in their infancy, regulate the processing of certain public data. Politicians face growing pressure to explain their own activities as political-administrative procedures become increasingly complex. The public sector can thus save money with Mashups, due to the benefits of simplified, custom application development and the ability to make their policies more easily understood by their constituents.

How it works:

FixMyStadt allows citizens to report issues to their local government anywhere in the world via internet through a web interface or mobile application. Citizens who take the time to report issues and see them fixed are motivated to get more engaged in their local communities. Using FixMyStadt mobile application developed on top of the FOKUS Media Web Runtime MWR 2012 is much easier for citizens to report issues by accessing device features such as camera and GPS which are integrated in the most smartphone devices todays. All reported issues are stored in one place in the FixMyStadt Backend-System and are accessible from other applications via a REST API. Mashup developers are able to integrate all these information in their Mashup applications by accessing the REST API via AJAX. Thanks to the MashWeb real-time notification platform Mashup applications are able to receive real-time notifications after subscribing for issues fulfill a set of predefined criteria such as category, status, location, etc.

Structured Data as Basis

One essential prerequisite for the development of Government Mashups is the processing of public data into a structured, machine-readable format. Based on this data, public administrators or other relevant actors from business and civil society can create custom applications. In the short term, large amounts of existing data can be extracted from databases and websites using relevant extraction procedures. However the continuous processing of data using a data infrastructure will require governmental, technical, organizational and legal changes. It is possible to develop platforms to process the data and include existing administrative processes in publishing the data. A legal framework however needs to be created for the active preparation of machine readable data and to support its further use.

Technologies

FOKUS MashWeb - Distributing secure cross-platform web applications

FOKUS Media Web Runtime MWR - Bringing Rich Internet Applications on Mobile and Consumer Electronics Devices