All in a year’s work: the SocietyWorks annual review is here
For anyone who’s been following what we get up to at SocietyWorks for a while now, you’ll know that at the end of each year we feature in our parent charity mySociety’s annual review, looking back at what we’ve achieved, thanking those who joined us for the journey and giving a flavour of what’s to come in the next twelve months.
This year, while we are still featured in the mySociety review, we had so much to cover for 2021 that we’ve created our own spinoff version especially for SocietyWorks.
From further expanding the scope of our digital services for the public sector and finding yet more ways to make it easier for citizens to digitally engage with their council to welcoming several new organisations into our community and several more new faces into our team, 2021 has certainly been a busy one.
If you’d like to join us in taking a look back at the last year and taking a peek at what’s to come, you can read the SocietyWorks annual review here.
And if you’re also interested in what mySociety has been up to, here’s the charity’s review.
A look back at a year like no other
Well, it’s been quite a year, hasn’t it?
2020 certainly won’t be one SocietyWorks will ever forget, not least because we didn’t exist as you know us until April!
Expanding our horizons
At the start of 2020, it was all about FixMyStreet Pro. And while our beloved FixMyStreet Pro is very much still the jewel in our crown, we’ve been busy this year exploring how else we can improve local government services for everyone, under the new brand, SocietyWorks.
With that in mind, we rolled out two new offerings around Waste and Noise, while also executing a whole lot of refinements and new features for FixMyStreet and FixMyStreet Pro, including:
- New ways to locate yourself on the FixMyStreet map.
- A freshly updated codebase: FixMyStreet 3.0.
- The use of new PWA technology, which means FixMyStreet can act just like an app on your phone or device.
- Easy tree reporting thanks to integration with Ezytreev.
- New category options for co-brands, such as bike reporting on the TFL version of FixMyStreet, Streetcare.
Friends old and new
New authorities to integrate with FixMyStreet Pro this year are Hackney, Highways England, Transport Focus, Cheshire East and — just this minute — Central Bedfordshire, bringing the total number of Pro bodies to 22.
As well as welcoming new authorities into the SocietyWorks fold, we have also appreciated longtime friends after working together to scope out new services, such as doing some consequence scanning with Hackney Council and helping to create a simple and intuitive mapping interface with Transport Focus.
Looking ahead
By the end of 2020, more than 500,000 reports will have been made through FixMyStreet this year.
And in a year where we’ve all gained a new appreciation for and desire to protect our local areas, that figure just reminds us of how proud we are to be the home of a service like FixMyStreet.
With any luck, 2021 will be a little less…turbulent, shall we say, than 2020 has been. Whatever happens though, we at SocietyWorks are looking forward to continuing to help bring about improvements through our services for local authorities and citizens alike.
If you would like to, you can read mySociety’s complete annual report here.