Norway's own FixMyStreet fixes 1,250 problems in 3 months

Norwegian street repair - FiksGataMi in action

FiksGataMi is an open source based service which allows Norwegian citizens to report local street problems to the authorities. In its first three months of operation, it has initiated the fixing of 1,250 problems, with 3,700 citizens contributing over 6,000 reports, according to a report on OSOR.eu.

Based on FixMyStreet by the UK group MySociety, the software allows users to enter a postcode, place a pin in the displayed map and then enter details of the problem. Once done, the problem is reported to the appropriate council. FixMyStreet also allows people to browse local problems, set up alerts by RSS or email and even generate posters and flyers to let others know about the service. In the UK, over 100,000 problems have been reported.

Thanks to the application being open source, volunteers at the Norwegian Unix User Group were able to take the software and customise it for Norway's 273 municipalities using map data from OpenStreetMap. Even the name was customised; FiksGataMi is Norwegian for "Fix My Street". They were assisted by Friprog, the Norwegian Open Source Competence Center, and Government Administration Services, a Norwegian government agency. Peter Reinholdtsen, head of NUUG, said they had been "completely overwhelmed by the response at the launch, and are very pleased to see that so many people have found FiksGataMi useful."

People wanting to find out more about FixMyStreet should visit the MySociety project page where details of how it can be adapted for local councils are available. Source code for the application is available on github under an AGPL3 licence.

(djwm)