In an increasingly partisan era, SeeClickFix believes technology can get neighbors on the same page After an election season shaped by social media bubbles, fake news, and email hacking, technology hasn?t exactly shown itself to be the best tool for improving the civic good. But today?s hangover from technological trouble masks the ways that civic tech, done right, can have a positive impact on government, especially on the local level.
If someone introduced a tool that helps unite neighbors and solve millions of small, local issues across the country, from potholes to scrubbing graffiti, it would be celebrated as a community godsend. That?s the track record that SeeClickFix, an app and mobile 311 system which allows users to report problems anonymously, has racked up since it launched almost a decade ago in New Haven, Connecticut. According to co-founder Ben Berkowitz, the technology is used by over 300 municipalities and government groups across the country and has solved 85 percent of all reported issues (3,145,179 total as of mid-January). But SeeClickFix has also shown a practical approach to digital democracy that may be an object lesson in an era where many expect to focus on making changes at the local level.
?People who speak up about changing things in their neighborhoods, and the people in the government who fix things, aren?t as far apart as everyone wants to assume,? says Berkowitz. ?There are bad apples, but there are a lot more good apples. People wh...