Using open standards means that each of your services can talk to each other freely — and that’s the key to unlocking savings.
We believe that open source software is essential to improving tools for society as a whole.
It reduces the barriers to entry in terms of accessing useful software and ensuring the longevity of services.
Our approach to development adheres to government-recommended open standards — all centred around improving transparency, flexibility and accountability.
We recommend where possible using the Open311 data standard. It brings benefits for you as a council or other public authority, and it’s great for members of the public and developers too.
What is Open311?
In a nutshell, Open311 is a free, international technology, known as an open standard, that allows civic reporting services and systems to ‘talk to’ each other. It’s an agreed and common way to format data being sent between different street and environment services.
Open311 isn’t new (we’ve been using it to connect to council systems since 2011), but it still isn’t as widely known as it deserves to be.
Open311 fetches a list of acceptable types of report as dictated by a public authority so that the receiving service can display them as options for the user 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 authority’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.
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.
Choice and control
Our adherence to open standards enables us to offer a wide range of options for authorities wanting to use our software.
When it comes to the reporting of local street, highway and environment faults, councils and other public authorities can connect with our technology in a number of ways:
You can do this yourself (for free) using our Open311 API.
We can build and maintain the integration for you (carries an annual fee).
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.
Enfield Borough Council uses open standards to integrate its backend system with the national FixMyStreet service
Reduce costs and create savings
Through the elimination of expensive emails and manual intervention copying reports into systems, using open standards like Open311 helps you to achieve savings in both time and money.
Having control over how your data is received also means no longer relying on a third party to make changes on your behalf.
Plus, for principal authorities looking to integrate with FixMyStreet Pro, we offer a yearly discount where the Open311 integration is set up and run by the authority. See a full overview of plans and pricing here.
How do I get started with Open311 and what does it cost?
Open311 is a free technology. Setting up the 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 can build and maintain the integration for you (carries an annual fee). Please contact us if you’d like to discuss this.
For more information about anything to do with open standards, please send us a message and a member of our team will get right back to you. Contact us
