We fully support open standards

Using Open Data standards means that each of your services can talk to each other freely — and that’s the key to unlocking savings.

Open data standards means each of your services can talk to each other freely — the key to unlocking savings.

Connect our services up to each of your existing software and CRM systems for seamless integration: we’ll guide you every step of the way.

We recommend where possible using the Open311 data standard. It brings benefits for you as a council, and it’s great for your residents and developers too.

What is Open311?

Open311 is an Open Data standard: in this case, an agreed and common way to format data being sent between different street and environment services.

Open311 fetches a list of acceptable types of report as dictated by you, the council, so that the receiving service can display them as options for the citizen to choose from. Typically, these might be categories such as ‘broken streetlight’, ‘pothole’, ‘graffiti’, etc.

You control which issues can be reported — without incurring additional development costs

Open311 dictates how information that passes between your council’s systems and services like FixMyStreet Pro should be formatted; it also formats dates, times, and locations consistently. For the techies amongst you it works by standard GET and POST HTTP requests that return XML or optionally JSON.

Learn about the Open311 specification

What are the benefits of using Open311?

When a council establishes an Open311 endpoint, anyone can build a service which can send reports directly into your council systems. You can keep everything secure with API keys or log-ins.

In the case of FixMyStreet Pro, this means that with your permission we can submit user reports directly into your CRM, confident that they will be formatted in a way that you can accept, and that they contain all of the information that you need to respond and action within your existing workflow.

Reduce customer service tasks and improve your response times

If you set up your Open311 endpoint to support two-way synchronisation, we can pull information back into our services, be it FixMyStreet Pro or WasteWorks, for example, to display the current status of reports, close them down automatically and keep everyone up to date with the same information.

By using Open311 you’re not tied into a single proprietary system; you can easily connect multiple systems and apps together keeping everything synchronised and up to date, or swap services out over time.

How do I get started with Open311 and what does it cost?

Setting up an Open311 endpoint yourself, to provide access to one or more of your current services, shouldn’t take you more than a few days of development: it usually only needs the support of your technical team and some project management time.

We’re happy to give you some advice if you are just getting started, and you can find our full Open311 specification here.

See a full overview of plans and pricing here

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