TC50: CitySourced lets citizens report potholes, graffiti to local government

September 15, 2009 | Kim-Mai Cutler | Comments |
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citysourced-logoCitySourced is a mobile app that lets residents report problems to their local government and hold them accountable for it.

The company launched today at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco.

To report a problem, you load CitySourced’s app to your phone and choose whether it’s trash, a graffiti issue, or something else. Then you add a description, and take a photo or tweet one to Twitter. This information is packaged with GPS location info from your phone and routed directly, says CitySourced, to city hall. The company claims the app works nationwide with 1900 cities. San Jose will be the first city to adopt it as their official 311 platform. An app for the new Palm Pre phone will soon be available, too.

The company’s pitch: City governments can use CitySourced to save money and make themselves more accountable. The company will offer governments descriptive analytics reports, so officials can see if there’s a spike in graffiti problems in a certain area, or track whether they’re efficiently resolving open reports.

Judges at the conference provided some feedback to the company.

Kevin Rose, Digg: Wants to make CitySourced’s data available to other residents. (CitySourced says it’s implementing a Digg-style voting system to prioritze problems.)

Tim O’Reilly, O’Reilly Media: A huge fan of these types of applications. But I worry about the defensibility of the product — how do you become a market leader? Lots of cities are holding contests to develop open 311 apps.

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Photo of Kim-Mai Cutler

About the Author, Kim-Mai Cutler

Kim-Mai was born and raised a stone's throw from Apple headquarters in Cupertino by a devout Hewlett-Packard family. After attending UC Berkeley, Kim-Mai worked for Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires in New York, Los Angeles, London and Buenos Aires. Follow her on Twitter at @kimmaicutler, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

  • I really like what citysourced is up to especially with the focus on geo-location/mobile/real-time - super cool stuff. Can't wait to check it out in more detail - would like to help with Minneapolis (#msp).
  • ParkScan - parkscan.org - is a non-profit which has been doing this in the San Francisco park system for years (I wrote their original web application). It doesn't require you to use an iPhone app. I believe they are also expanding into other cities.

    Having worked on a similar project I know from experience that it's actually a lot of work to get this integrated with city governments, who tend to be slow to act, and very cautious of change. Being able to make reports is one thing but getting them fixed is entirely another. I'd be very suspect about the scalability of this idea.
  • Do City Governments want to become more accountable?
    It's a pain in the a. for them if reporting becomes more convenient.
  • Thanks for article. I also wanted to make sure that SeeClickFix was on your radar. We launched a similar service about a year ago and have 1000s of issues reported, paying government customers and 10,000s of users. Major media properties like the New York Times, Boston Globe, San Francisco
    Chronicle and Dallas Morning News have all embedded SeeClickFix feeds or web widgets in their websites. We were featured at the Gov 2.0 conference by O'Rielly and won the WeMedia Pitchit competition in March (http://seeclickfix.blogspot.com/2009/02/seeclic...).

    If you're interested in learning more, please check out www.SeeClickFix.com
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