Blog posts about FixMyStreet platform

A new feature has been released for FixMyStreet giving users the option to start their reports with a photo, the data from which can be extracted to speed up the reporting process.

As well as making the reporting process quicker, this new functionality should also increase the accuracy of reports, removing the need for users who can’t or don’t want to report the problem at its location to remember exactly where it was at a later point in time.

Where a photo has been taken using a smartphone with geo-tagging enabled, FixMyStreet can now use the data stored in the uploaded photo to identify the location of the problem the user wants to report. 

Once uploaded, FixMyStreet will display a map with a pin dropped at the location identified. Users then have the option to either move the map pin if necessary, or continue with the report.

If a user does not have photo geo-tagging turned on, or the device they are using is not compatible with this functionality, they can still begin reports with a photo, but they will also need to identify the location of the problem either through GPS (if currently at the location) or using a postcode, street name or area.

Users can still report problems on FixMyStreet without using a photo if they can’t take one or don’t have one.

Photo-first reporting has been rolled out across the FixMyStreet website and app, as well as to all cobranded instances of FixMyStreet Pro.

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Got a question about photo-first reporting on FixMyStreet? Get in touch.

As a map-based reporting solution, FixMyStreet Pro can do lots of clever things to help users make accurate and actionable reports of local street, highway and environment faults.

From suggesting potential duplicate reports, to automatically diverting reports between different authorities – and even detecting when a report is being made on a private road.

How private road detection works on FixMyStreet Pro

Using an asset layer shared via integration with an asset management system, councils and other public authorities responsible for fixing local problems can detect when a user is trying to make a report on a private or unadopted road.

When making a report via an authority’s branded instance of FixMyStreet Pro, users find the location of their report either by typing in the area, postcode or street name if they know it, or by using their current geo-location.

The map then loads at that location, the pin can be placed on the map exactly where the problem is located and a category can be selected.

If the map pin is not placed on the asset layer which depicts the roads adopted by the council or authority in question, then the user can be shown a message to inform them and signpost to where they may be able to redirect their report.

In instances where certain assets on a private road remain the responsibility of the local council or authority, FixMyStreet Pro supports the triaging of this based on the report location and category.

This ensures the user never needs to worry about who’s responsible for what and the authority only receives reports they can deal with.

Private road detection on the national FixMyStreet site

As you may already know, FixMyStreet Pro was born out of FixMyStreet, the national reporting service launched by our parent charity mySociety in 2007.

Being a purposeful piece of technology which supports open standards to remove barriers to accessing useful services for the public sector, councils can opt to set up their own integration with FixMyStreet (for free) using a standard known as Open311.

Non-FixMyStreet Pro users who set up and run their own Open311 integration with the national reporting site can also supply their own asset layer for adopted or unadopted roads to help eliminate avoidable and incorrect reports. Find out more about the FixMyStreet Open311 API.

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For more information about how FixMyStreet Pro works, request a demo from our friendly team.

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We’re delighted to announce that we will soon be launching a self-service version of FixMyStreet especially for parish and town councils.

FixMyStreet for Parish & Town Councils will enable even the smallest local councils to offer a user-friendly and responsive reporting service to local residents for issues under their responsibility.

Built into the robust FixMyStreet platform, parish and town councils will be able to set up and manage their service themselves, adding their own logo to the reporting page, choosing their own categories and managing responses to remove reliance on upper tier authorities.

Where councils share responsibility for certain issues depending on location or asset type, FixMyStreet will automatically triage reports according to the required criteria to help eliminate misreporting and duplication of effort.

Find out more about FixMyStreet for Parish & Town Councils.

On most of our FixMyStreet Pro instances, we use Ordnance Survey’s Maps API to supply the map tiles for our maps. Councils have free access to the API under the Public Sector Geospatial Agreement (PSGA), so we can display mapping up to a very high zoom level.

Microsoft is now retiring its Bing Maps API, which we have used on fixmystreet.com and some other instances for many years, and so we have now switched these to also use the OS Maps API – in instances where we do not have PSGA access, we use OS OpenData served from our own tile server for more zoomed in levels.

For the OS Leisure map tiles, this should provide an increase in image quality, and should also be more up to date in general. In Northern Ireland, fixmystreet.com is now using OpenStreetMap, ongoing thanks to them for their services.

Functionally, the only difference users might notice is that the Bing Maps API provided an aerial view option which is not currently replicable. One way around this for FixMyStreet Pro council cobrands could be to utilise an internal GIS mapping server that can supply map tiles and aerial imagery, or to provide us with OS imagery data for us to serve. If you’re a Pro client and you think this may apply to you, please open a ticket on the helpdesk system.

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For more information about the FixMyStreet platform, please get in touch.

Parish and town councils wanting to keep track of reports made via FixMyStreet within their ward boundary can make use of FixMyStreet’s new parish-level email alerts and RSS feed. 

The FixMyStreet email alerts and RSS feed functionality enables users to subscribe to alerts for reports made within a certain area or that go to a certain destination, the latter of which only included upper tier authorities until recently. 

The new parish level alerts give local people and councillors the ability to stay informed of what’s happening in the community, subscribing to be notified of issues reported within their parish.

To set up an email or RSS alert feed, users can go to the ‘Local alerts’ page from the main menu, or click ‘Get updates of problems in this council’ from any ‘All reports’ page.

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said: “Creating a snapshot of communities is among the things FixMyStreet does best, and I am delighted that we are able to offer parishes better access to data on what’s happening within their boundary. 

“The new email alerts and RSS feed for parishes is only the start of a drive to make more of FixMyStreet’s functionality available to all levels of local authority.”

There are more developments underway to further extend the functionality of FixMyStreet to parish councils, building upon the existing functionality created for our unitary FixMyStreet Pro users to provide better shared reporting for devolved services. 

For more information about FixMyStreet or FixMyStreet Pro, please get in touch. 

A new version of the open source software upon which our FixMyStreet Pro solution runs has been released.

Version 6.0 of FixMyStreet includes new features such as:

• The ability to add a category filter to the reporting process, letting people search for a particular category. (This involves adding a category_filter.html template to your cobrand, similar to the one used on fixmystreet.com.)
• A new geolocation button to centre the map at your location.
• Adding the report ID reference to lists of reports in emails.
• We redirect to a confirmation page when creating a report, reducing the risk of Safari creating a duplicate report.
• Cobrands can have different map display times for open/closed/fixed reports.
• All uploaded images are now converted to JPEGs.
• Users can opt out of questionnaires.

Admin improvements

• We have improved the navigation in the admin, moving the main navigation to a sidebar. This is accompanied by minor display and performance improvements in various admin pages.
• Extra questions can now be multiple-choice using checkboxes, or a datetime picker, in addition to the existing options of text field, text area, and single value.
• You can make a phone number required for a particular category.
• On the dashboard, you can now filter by multiple categories, and we’ve fixed the CSV export to not ignore reports that had updates that were only unconfirmed or hidden.
• A long standing bug viewing a category when it has more than 1,000 history entries has been fixed.

Development improvements

• FixMyStreet has been around for a long time, and implemented its own way of sorting extra data on a per-report or update basis. Since then, PostgreSQL has added JSON support, and we have now moved the database tables to store data in this standard way.
• The site can now automatically spot a favicon.ico file present in the web/cobrands/<your-cobrand> directory, rather than having to add your own header template.
• Cobrands can provide (optionally per-category) custom distances for duplicate lookups.
• The daemon will deal with waiting reports in a random order.

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Version 6.0 of FixMyStreet is available to anyone running a site on the FixMyStreet platform, which includes: our own fixmystreet.com; the installations we host and manage for councils and other authorities; and the FixMyStreet instances run by others all over the world.

Developers and other technical-minded folk can view the full release notes on the FixMyStreet Platform website.

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Image: Tania Malréchauffé on Unsplash

FixMyStreet, our map-based reporting tool for street and highway problems, and FixMyStreet Pro, the fully branded, hosted and integrated version of the service, enable you to assign a status to each report you receive that is visible to the public and reflects the issue’s journey to resolution. 

With all reports displayed on the map, this report status adds an extra layer of transparency for councils and other public sector organisations using the service, allowing citizens to see not only what problems have already been reported, but also what’s being done about them.

A tool for transparency

When used properly, report statuses help to build trust and increase transparency, while also deterring duplicate reports and failure demand, which pushes report-makers back onto the phone to your customer contact centre in search of clarification or more information.

Councils and other public sector FixMyStreet Pro customers can choose from a number of statuses, designed to help you accurately share where a report is up to within your internal processes in a way that is easy for citizens to understand. 

The standard report states on FixMyStreet are currently as follows:

• Open

Report is open and confirmed (automatically applied to all new reports once report-maker has verified their email [if not signed in at the time of reporting])

• Action scheduled 

Report has been reviewed and action has been scheduled

• For triage

Report is awaiting internal review or re-categorisation

• In progress

Report’s resolution is in progress/action is being carried out

• Investigating

Report is under investigation

• Planned

Report’s resolution has been planned/scheduled as part of a wider maintenance project

• Closed

Report has been closed for one of a number of reasons (this is a generic status only to be used if another cannot be assigned, such as ‘fixed’, ‘not responsible’ or ‘no further action’ – reasons for closure can and should be included within the response template, which can be done manually or automatically via integration)

• Duplicate 

Report is about an issue that’s already been reported

• Internal referral

Report has been referred to another team within the council/public body

• Not responsible

Report is about an issue that is the responsibility of another council/public body/private organisation

• No further action

Report’s issue cannot be fixed/issue does not meet intervention criteria

• Fixed

Report’s issue has been fixed

Best practice

We leave it up to you to decide which statuses best suit your internal processes – report status names can be modified across the FixMyStreet platform (this includes the national, free-to-use FixMyStreet.com site) to better reflect those used by your customer service and inspection teams, and terms used within your integrated back-end systems. 

You can also make use of hardcoded statuses, which are named differently on the front and back end to make them easier to understand for citizens on one side and staff on the other.

Equally, additional statuses can be added if required, or you can restrict those which you do not want to be visible to the public.

However, we do recommend that, when changing the status of a report, you make use of FixMyStreet’s ability to provide a tailored, explanatory response update that will be attached to the report and emailed to all subscribers, giving more context about what the status means to help manage expectations. 

Similarly, when marking a report as ‘action scheduled’ it is worth explaining your service level agreements to set expectations for when the action should be carried out.

You can also use automatic templates that can be added to the FixMyStreet Pro front-end workflow based on back-end codes. For example, multiple codes used in your asset management or CRM system can be attached to different ‘action scheduled’ responses. 

Or if you’re using FixMyStreet Pro as your case management system, you can create your own templates and simply select the most relevant as you go.  

Avoiding confusion

Whichever way you organise your report statuses, our golden rule is to ensure that reports are not marked as ‘fixed’ until the problem has actually been resolved, or assigning one of the closed statuses (eg. ‘closed’, ‘no further action’, ‘not responsible’) without providing an explanation as to why and what this means to you.

For example, ‘closed’ to you could mean ‘action scheduled’, but to the report-maker ‘closed’ could be interpreted to mean that the issue has been fixed, so when they see that the problem is still there, it may provoke them to call you or try to reopen or duplicate the report.

Sometimes this occurs because your customer contact centre hasn’t been provided with enough guidance on what each status means in relation to your processes or how to use the response templates. Other times it’s because your front-end status mapping isn’t quite matched up to your back-end (asset management and/or CRM) status mapping.

We can help with training sessions or report status mapping, so please speak to your account manager if this is something you’d like to explore.

Want to know more about FixMyStreet or FixMyStreet Pro?

Take a look on our website, or why not request a short demo with our team?

We recently released version 3.0 of the open source software which FixMyStreet runs on.

This brings some substantial improvements to the code. The update is available to anyone running a site on the FixMyStreet platform, which includes our own fixmystreet.com; the installations we provide for councils and authorities; and the FixMyStreet instances run by others, in places from Australia to Uruguay.

If you run a site on the FixMyStreet platform yourself, or are just interested in the technical details, you can read the release notes here.

Meanwhile, here’s a rundown of the new front-end features you might notice if you’re a user of FixMyStreet.

Run the site as an app

FixMyStreet can now be added to phones (and desktops for that matter) as a ‘progressive app’. Here’s what to look for when you visit fixmystreet.com:

On Chrome for Android:

Access from the bar at the bottom of the screen.

On iOS:

Click the share icon at the foot of the screen.

Then select ‘add to home screen’.

On Firefox for Android:

Look for the pop up notification or tap the home icon with a plus sign in it in the URL bar.

Any of these methods will install a version of FixMyStreet that will behave like an app, placing an icon on your desktop, browser start page or home screen.

This way there is no need to download or update from the app store, and changes to the main website (which are invariably released sooner than on the app) will be immediately available to you.

Cobrands (for example the councils that use FixMyStreet as part of their own websites, and people running FixMyStreet in their own countries) can provide their own logo and colourscheme as well.

Mobile browser improvements

Whether you install the progressive web app or just visit fixmystreet.com on your mobile browser, you may notice some nice new features.

• If you use the geolocation function (‘use my location’), your position will be displayed on the map:
• When viewing an area, you can access the filters to narrow the reports displayed down by their status (fixed/open etc) and category:
• If you’re about to report something that looks like a duplicate, you’ll not only be shown the report/s that have already been made, but you’ll also see a small inline map without having to scroll back to the main map to check where they are.
• The site recognises that when you’re on a mobile, the message about uploading a photo shouldn’t invite you to ‘drag and drop’, but rather to either take a new one or select a photo from your phone.
• If you’ve placed the pin incorrectly, the ‘try again’ process is clearer.

Sharing reports

If a picture paints a thousand words, then your Twitter character count just went stratospheric. Now, when you share a report on places like Twitter or Facebook, if there’s a photo included in the report, that will also be pulled through.

Previously, the ‘open graph image’ that was shown by default was the same for every report — which could get a bit boring in aggregate, and certainly missed some of the impact that people might want to share when they’re posting about their own, or others’ reports.

Social media isn’t the only place that FixMyStreet reports can be piped to, though — the site also has several RSS capabilities that have been baked in since its early days.

For those not totally up to speed with RSS and what it can do, we’re now no longer displaying them as raw XML but as a nice simple web page that explains its purpose.

To see this in action, click ‘Local Alerts’ in the top menu of any page. Here’s a before and after:

What benefits one, benefits all

Much of this work is thanks to NDI, the National Democratic Institute.

NDI offer the FixMyStreet codebase as one of their DemTools, installing it in countries around the world as an innovation which empowers citizens to keep their neighbourhoods clean and safe.

Thanks to this partnership, NDI funded the addition of new features which they had identified as desirable — and which, thanks to the open codebase, will benefit users of every FixMyStreet site worldwide.

There are some other significant additions in this release, including integration, back end and security improvements, all of which will be of most interest to developers and site admins — so if you’d like to see them, head over to the full write up on the FixMyStreet platform blog.

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Image: Max Fuchs

The FixMyStreet codebase is used all over the world by people running versions of the site for their own country or jurisdiction. This week, we’re proud to announce the release of FixMyStreet version 2.0.

This version contains a wide array of new features that benefit FixMyStreet sites’ users, administrators, and the officials who receive reports. They include elements that the UK FixMyStreet was the first to trial, such as nicer-looking HTML emails for users and authorities, the ability to filter reports by multiple states and categories, a new admin user system with graduated permissions, and various bugfixes and development improvements.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of blog posts over on fixmystreet.org/blog/, examining the changes in detail. If you run a FixMyStreet site, or you’re just interested in coding and technical issues, you may find them of interest. Meanwhile, here’s the broad overview.

New front-end feature

HTML email

There is now the option for all emails sent by FixMyStreet to be HTML formatted where previously they were plain text only. This includes confirmation and questionnaire emails to the user, and report emails to the public body. These emails include any image added to the report, plus a small static map of the problem’s location.

State/category filtering and sorting of list pages

When viewing a list of reports, you can now filter and sort them in pretty much any way you choose, including sorting by most- or least-recently updated, newest or oldest, or most commented. You can also select multiple categories or states (e.g. “fixed”).

 Pretty area highlighting on body pages

The highlighting of areas on a body page has been inverted, so that the unimportant parts of the map are shaded and you can interact more easily with reports on the page.

Users can now update their own email address

This was a frequent request from users and we’re glad to report that they can now do it themselves on their account page.

Performance improvements

When looking at reports from a list page, the other report pins stay visible so that it is easier to switch between them. The report itself is being pulled in behind the scenes, meaning the whole page does not need to reload. The map no longer extends underneath the sidebar and header, which makes things easier, and a scroll wheel can now zoom the map in and out.

Making privacy options clearer

The reporting form has been separated into public and private sections, to make it clearer which parts of what you provide will be made visible on the site.

Showing the relevant recipient

If you live in an area where there’s more than one body, the category you pick normally dictates which body we send your report to. Now, when you select the category we update the name of the body given at the top of the report page, if we know that the report will be sent there.

New admin user system

Admin users can now use the same log-in right across the site – whether they’re making a report like a standard user, or logging in to make edits and moderate the site.

In the past, the distinction between admin and other users was black and white. As an admin user, you had access to every part of the site, but users can now be given individual permissions for various layers of access. These include:

• Proxy users This layer grants the ability to create a report or update on behalf of a body, or as another user. We envisage this being useful in a body’s contact centre, where they receive a report over a phone and enter it into FixMyStreet as that user;
• Report editors Giving the power to edit a report’s category, state, or location. If the admin user changes the category, and that change means that a different body is now responsible for the report, it will be re-sent;
• List makers, who can compile their own shortlist of reports they wish to go and inspect. This may be useful for a contractor or team who wishes to compile the day’s tasks;
• Quick responders These users have access to response templates, allowing them to edit and publish templated updates;
• Prioritisers These users may set different priorities on reports;
• Trusted users A simple reputation system, which e.g. potentially lets reports from trusted users be actioned more quickly.

The admin report edit form has also been greatly improved, including a map to update a report’s location (and re-sending the report if the body changes), and much tidier layout.

Bugfixes and development changes

Bugfixes include updating the top-level domain (TLD) list for email validation, hiding authorities which don’t exist any more on the all reports page, and fixing the previously-broken photo preview display after form submission. We have dropped support for Internet Explorer 6.

If you’re a re-user of the codebase, there are a number of changes that will hopefully help you out. See the extended version of this blog post on fixmystreet.org for more details.

If you have any questions, please do get in touch.