City Sourced is a very cool iPhone app which could be the next way to interact with the government and enforcement bodies in your city. If you find something objectionable, like some nasty graffiti, all you do is take a picture with your iPhone, add a comment, and submit. The report goes off to City Hall, complete with location data.
Once it’s sent, cities who sign up with City Sourced get some metrics about the sort of reports coming in. Based on this software, the city officials don’t just get a few reports, but actual analytics. For example, the presenter for City Sourced mentioned that cities can see when and where graffiti is occurring the most. If you find that it clusters around a high school every June, you can figure that some kids are out of school and are getting into trouble.
What’s so neat about this is that, from a user perspective, this makes it very easy for people to send in reports, which means a lot of stuff which would otherwise go unreported will make its way to the officials. Additionally, the founder said they’d be adding a Digg-like system for people to know about other issues going on in their cities (and neighborhoods), plus users can vote on reported issues they want to see taken care of first.
San Jose is a launch partner for City Sourced, and Palm has shown interest in getting the app for WebOS.
You can find the panelist’s concerns here, though they were mostly positive (especially Kevin Rose, who liked that City Sourced would have a Digg -esque system).
