Smarter Government – Keeping the streets clean with Windows Phone 7

LoveCleanStreets is an award winning free online portal that helps people who live or work in London to upload photographs of community problems that require action by the local authority. The system—pioneered by the London Borough of Lewisham with Microsoft partner bbits—gives citizens the power to improve their immediate environment.

In Lewisham, complaints about graffiti fell by 30 per cent in just two years from the portal going live. Clean-up times have been cut drastically and resident satisfaction with the street cleaning service and local authority responsiveness has increased, as you can see for yourself in this BBC news coverage of this innovative citizen service that makes full use of smartphone apps:

Windows Phone 7 app for LoveCleanStreets

Users can submit reports using a free mobile phone application. They can also send a text or visit the www.lovecleanstreets.org  web portal. There they can see and search for all the reports in their area and share them through social networking sites, review progress, or subscribe to updates. The system can be fully integrated into local authority systems, ensuring that issues can be dealt with smoothly and allowing developers to create their own applications to submit and retrieve reports.

At a time when every penny counts, Love Clean Streets is a leading example of citizens being directly engaged in improving public services, seeing the difference it makes to their area and thinking more positively about the responsiveness of their local authority. The London Borough of Lewisham has seen graffiti complaints fall by 30 per cent and clean-up time improve by 87% as a result of the solution.

You can also read the full story of how bbits applied Microsoft technology to the lovecleanstreets solution here

Posted by Ian