Royal Click, a company owned by young Botswana has come up with an innovative application that lets local authorities and residents help to solve issues that affect them on a daily basis in their areas of residence. The project dubbed Power to the People, comes at a time when people are tired of trying to get the MPs and local leaders attend to issues that are really pertinent and perrenial in most parts of the city.
In an interview with Biztechafrica during the app launch at Railpark mall, the project initiator, Thatha Phole, said the idea is to create “social entrepreneureship stemming from the fact that there was a problem of reporting routing concerns such as potholes, poor services, lighting outages to the right officials with the right information. We seek to use the power of the internet to empower our citizens and bring them closer together and make our neitghbourhoods a better place to live and work,” explained Phole. Power To the People allows anyone to report and track non-emergency issues.
The Power To The People platform consists of three main applications. The reporting application, the management application, and the analytics application. All the citizens need to do is to register in the system, providing their full name and an e-mail address used for communication with the municipality.
“The functionality of the issue submission application is also available through native mobile apps for Android and iOS. The mobile apps are fully interconnected with the corresponding web-based service and infrastructure of the municipality, responsible for resolving the submitted issues.
Integrating all functionality of the web-based service, mobile apps provide additional features:
- automatically determining the geographic location of the issue via GPS, freeing the user from the burden to manually identify the problem on the map or type the exact address.
- Easy visualization of the problem, using the phone camera to attach photos of the issue.
- Offering services based on the geographical location of the user, such as showing only the issues that are within walking distance.
Includes information on the number of total issues, the number of issues that belong to each status, the number of total users, votes, comments and the total active days of the platform. The above information can be exported to an easy to process format for example Excel.
The statistical reports extend the information available in the Usage Summaries with the following:
- Percentage of total issues reported to all municipality departments separately,
- monthly count of total reported issues from the activation of the platform and onwards,
- statistics for the most active users according to issues, comments or votes submitted.
The above information can be exported to an easy to process format such as Excel.
As for the installation and configuration of the analytics application, for visualizing the data spatially and temporally, Phole adds that the application includes visualization of the issues on a map, either as points or as a heatmap and also features search functionality based on keywords contained in the title, description or in the comments of an issue. It also supports the extraction of a tag cloud from the descriptions of the reported issues, the monitoring of municipality departments performance and creates diagrams that illustrate how the issues are grouped by date. This way, useful conclusions are made about the problems that the municipality faces and also about how citizens use the platform.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): John Churu
Quelle/Source: BiztechAfrica, 15.12.2015
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