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FixMyStreet to become FixaMinGata in Sweden

Steve Woods International IT News, Open Source News Comments Off on FixMyStreet to become FixaMinGata in Sweden

Over the years, MySociety, an e-democracy project of the charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, whose aim is to build “socially focused tools with offline impacts”, has designed some great online tools. By way of an example, these include:

  • TheyWorkForYou to enable electors to track the work of their constituency MPs;
  • WriteToThem to help electors write to MPs;
  • WhatDoTheyKnow to assist UK citizens in submitting Freedom of Information Act (FoI) requests to UK public bodies.

One MySociety tool which is having an international impact is FixMyStreet, where people can report, view, or discuss local problems like potholes, graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs or street lighting.

EU open source public sector news website Joinup reports today that Swedish local authorities will soon unveil their version of FixMyStreet, to be named FixMinGata. The developers expect that a pilot version of the FixaMinGata site will become operational in March or April 2013.

image of site banner for FixaMinGata
Fix My Street coming soon to Sweden as Fixa Min Gata

The service is being developed by three organisations – Sambruk, Kivos and FFKP – but will be made available to all Swedish councils as a single, national service. Kivos is a network of mainly western Swedish local authorities promoting the use of free and open source software and open standards. Sambruk represents more than one hundred co-operating local authorities, focussing on local e-government and business development. FFKP is a non-profit organisation that ‘promotes a free society, built on free culture and free software’.

The project received support of some Kr. 3 mn. (approx. € 380,000) from the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems in November last year. With this money it is building a portal that can host, share and allow the re-use of electronic services like FixaMinGata. By running such applications from a ‘cloud platform’, the innovation agency aims to offer services that can be used by all Sweden’s local authorities.

A beta of FixMinGata was launched last year and is running Debian GNU/Linux servers and the Apache open source web server.

FixMyStreet has been available in Norway for some time where it is known as FiksGataMi.