Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/70379
D o you have an active and involved citizenry in your community? Would you like them to be more involved? Transparency is a buzzword often used in municipal government. Many citizens like to stay involved with their local government and often are happy to notify the city of issues they come across in their daily lives. Perhaps a street light is out and needs to be repaired. Maybe they came across a downed street sign while out for a walk, or there were tree limbs that blew down from the wind and are impeding a trail. Even worse, their coffee spilled on their way to work from driving over a pothole. Community citizens often are the first to notice something is amiss before municipal staff sees the same issues. Previously, these issues were reported by a phone call, if at all, and the problem grew in sig- nificance. With the expanding use of new technology, many citizens now use computers or smartphones to communicate with their local government. Pioneering Community Golden, Colo., is a small community of 18,000 people located 10 miles west of Denver in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, but it faces the same problems of doing more with less that most municipalities across the country face. Dealing with dwindling or static bud- gets while still trying to provide a high level of service to its citizens is a paramount concern for the city. Golden implements several media designed to increase workplace efficiency, and it's changing business processes to have a more mobile workforce. Such mobility in the workplace includes using handheld devices to map infra- structure assets in the field, create and complete work orders on the fly, and streamline the flow of data from field to office and vice versa. In the case of potholes, the city had a Pothole Hotline program in place, where residents would find potholes and then call in to report them. Many times, imperfect descriptions of how large and where a pothole was located led to significant time spent taking phone calls, locating potholes and then sending crews to fix them. The city wanted to find a more efficient and modern way of allowing citizens to report non-emergency issues, such as potholes, directly to those fixing such problems. YourGOV Online In October 2010, the city launched YourGOV, an online and smartphone application that allows the city of Golden community to directly report non-emergency issues. Submitted issues are brought directly into the city's work-management solution, and users can track their issues from submittal to completion. All submit- ted issues have a spatial location associated with them, and they can be seen by registered site users. YourGOV was developed by Cartegraph, a municipal technology provider the city has been partnering with for more than 12 years, to help provide asset- and work-management solutions. Prior to YourGOV, if a citizen reported something such as potholes or damaged or missing signs, he or she had to call the city's main number, get routed to (hopefully) the appropriate department, which, in turn, had to communicate to a crew that there was an issue that needed to be addressed. It could take time to get to the appropriate depart- ment, and, inevitably, some issues fell through the cracks. Although not completely eliminating such phone calls, YourGOV reduced the number of calls the city Registered users can check the status of their submitted issue and see where other issues have been reported in the city. JUNE 2O12 / WWW . GEOPLA CE . COM 15