A few months ago some of you will remember I blogged about How Open Data even makes Garbage collection sexier, easier and cheaper. I suggested that, with open data, coders could digitize the city’s garbage collection schedule and city maps and enable citizens to download it into their calendar or even set up a recurring email reminder.
The post went fairly viral being picked up places like here and here. As a result, two weeks later Luke Closs and Kevin Jones, two Vancouver based coders with a strong sense of fun and civic duty emailed me and said they’d actually scrapped the data and had created an alpha version of the site. I offered my (meagre) skills to help move the application forward and we began working on it.
Today, I’m pleased to say that VanTrash has been launched. If you live in Vancouver (or don’t) please do take a look at the website.
Our goal with VanTrash is twofold. First: we want a great service that leverages public data to helpmake our fellow citizens’ lives a little better or easier. Second: we’d like to sign up 3000 or more users.
Since there are about 260,000 households in Vancouver (although many have private contracted garbage pick up) 3000 users would represent between 1-2% of all households for whom the city collects their garbage. There are not that many services that citizens opt in for that get this market penetration – especially services created for virtually nothing. The more users we get, the stronger the message we send to government’s everywhere that government is a platform and that we need to let citizens built on top of it. More importantly, we demonstrate that great, and useful, things can be done for cheap, a lesson citizens and governments need to constantly relearn.
So if you live in Vancouver, and you think there service would be helpful to you (or perhaps to a forgetful or absent minded friend, family member or neighbour) please sign up or spread the word.
eaves.ca 
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How about a service that enables citizens who are out and about to report graffiti or a pot hole? The app on your Blackberry, Android or iPhone lets you take a picture of the infraction. The app detects your location via GPS and once the image is loaded and approved, you are brought to the reporting screen. You can then identify what the problem is, add comments, and Tweet the problem out from your Twitter account.Once you press “file”, the report is captured, bundled and automatically transferred to the government agency that is responsible for the infraction. On the back end, the city agency gets a web dashboard that lets them see how many reports have been submitted, a map mashup of where the reports are located, pending reports that are incomplete, and graphs that break down reports by type over a given period of time. Cities can then download all the data into a file. The app is free for the user and cities pay an annual license fee for the dashboard. Startup CitySourced <http://www.citysourced.com/> is providing that service for San Jose Calif – and what better second city than one that is already in the swing of digital citizen initiatives?I have no biz connection to it – just a love of the uses you are describing in this blog – and a hope that my tiny village of Sausalito tries some
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@KareAnderson – this sounds similar to http://fixmystreet.ca
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Once you press “file”, the report is captured, bundled and automatically transferred to the government agency that is responsible for the infraction.
Once you press “file”, the report is captured, bundled and automatically transferred to the government agency that is responsible for the infraction.