Crowdsourcing Better Cities
Several recent news reports have highlighted what organizations around the world are doing to enlist citizens in making their communities and cities better places. Here are some examples.
Cleaning up Grafitti
An innovative New South Wales, Australia website is using crowd sourcing to log incidents of graffiti and forward reports to the appropriate authorities for cleaning up. Currently, when an incident is reported an alert of the damage is sent to local Rotary clubs, which dispatch volunteers to paint over the mess. The website also stores a record of the graffiti or tag, so if an offender is apprehended there is photographic evidence of the damage he or she has done.
In one recent example, a graffiti vandal who lived in one town was caught spray painting his tag in another. Police using the website found 10 more instances where residents had documented the vandal’s tag being sprayed.
”We’re not trying to make a vigilante group out of it,” said the site founder. ”It’s about getting rid of graffiti quickly, making it clean and recording information for the police, who can then find those people.”
Conserving Trees
Philadelphia, PA organizations are working together to inventory the city’s tree population. Tree inventories ensure that municipalities have data to consult when managing the urban forest. However, because creating a complete inventory is a time consuming and resource intensive process, a new web application PhillyTreeMap, provides an easy-to-use public inventorying platform that encourages the public to contribute to an interactive and dynamic map of the city’s tree population.
The project was commissioned by the City of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS), and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission. The application aligns with goals of making Philadelphia the number one green city in America by 2015 and of increasing the number of trees in a thirteen county region in southeastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware.
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