London mayor Boris Johnson had to pretend he’d never held a smartphone this morning as part of the photo-op surrounding the launch of a new Cloud-hosted app.
He certainly seemed happier grasping a paint brush for the cameras as Londoners were informed of the Love Clean London app, whereby members of the public can post examples of graffiti, street rubbish or anti-social behaviour on to their local council’s website to embarrass the latter into doing something about it.
The colourful Tory politico said as he helpfully painted over some fake daubing by Twickenham station in West London, chosen as the London borough of Richmond, where that’s located, has just signed up to the scheme. He said:
“Love Clean London gives people an easy way to report a discarded mattress or an outbreak of graffiti, helping their boroughs to direct finite resources where they are most needed,” In tough financial times, this smart use of technology can deliver genuine savings whilst encouraging people to take an active pride in their local environment. I am urging more boroughs to get behind it and more Londoners to spruce up the capital in the run up to 2012 and beyond.”
PR silliness aside, the system actually has a serious point and seems to be a promising piece of outreach.
The idea is to promote citizen crowdsourcing as part of the Love Clean London initiative (there are a number of ongoing ‘Love Clean’ projects on a national scale).
Using a Microsoft Azure Cloud back end, it’s an app for a range of phones and OSs, from Android to the iPhone to the BlackBerry via Windows 7 that allows punters to post, email or text tagged, GPS-fixed examples of grime, ‘grot spots,’ fly-tipping and other eyesores onto a website, where the public can track the progress of the local authority in clearing up the mess on a dedicated online map of environmental issues. (There’s also a regular online option.)
Any participating borough will simultaneously get an email with all the details to initiate a response. Finally, an interactive map shows all the reports, updating on the progress taken and shows environmental black-spots plus places where clean ups have taken place either by councils directly or with volunteer help.
The Mayor’s office says this will also deliver financial savings to any borough that signs up.
With just over 500 days to go until the start of the London Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Mayor wants to encourage higher standards of street cleanliness, with his team also claiming this supports the Mayor's drive to stimulate London's high tech and digital industries to find new solutions to city issues and create new jobs and enterprises.
Lewisham council invented and pioneered the basic five years ago and partly attributes it being able to hold street cleansing spending at 2003/04 levels while getting significant improvements in customer satisfaction, clean-up times and standards to its use; complaints about graffiti fell by 30% in just two years from the system going live and the borough has seen an 87% reduction in time spent to process an issue reported to them using the system.
A report using this system costs Lewisham £1.50 in comparison to a web based report costing £4.10 - and a report by phone, £5.10.
