Cycling Channel

IDEA TITLE
Cycling channel + City Navigator

Description
Cycling Channel (Fillarikanava) was a fix-my-street -like participation / issue reporting platform dedicated for cyclists. The service was piloted in Helsinki 2008-2011 and gathered promising success among cyclists (around 4000 messages and comments – generally good quality). Eventually the service died, because the gathered feedback got stuck in the service – at the time there was no tecnical possibility to easily transfer the messages to the usual feedback handling process of the city.

Nowadays the Helsinki City open issue reporting API (open 311) makes it possible to send the issues directly to the city’s feedback system and receive notification when the reported problems are solved.

The idea is to simply revitalize the old Cycling Channel concept and connect it to the issue reporting API. We also chose to use the great open source route planner application “City Navigator” as the base for the new mobile Cycling Channel, this gives opportunity to tie route planning and participation / issue reporting to one useful package for cyclists.

Naturally the idea is to do this as a multi-city service – we start off with Helsinki area and Tampere. Jyväskylä and Turku are also in radar in Finland. In other countries the cities with working 311 API are good candidates. In places where there is still not 311 API we need to have some sort of email-based-hack.

Value proposition
- Dedicated issue reporting for cyclists. In Helsinki “Pitäiskö fiksata” is meant for reporting all kinds of problems – targetted community (in this case syslists) make it possible to get deeper discussion and knowledge building around the reported issues.

- Route planning and issue reporting togeather. By building on top of the journey planner we can give make the one application more attractive for users. There is also idea to use the same development effort for creating dedicated issue reporting for the public transport users (see. www.fixmytransport.com/ ), where the issues would be reported directly to the transport authority.

Needs and problems it addresses
- Peoples need to report and discuss EASILY cycling related problems (and also good solutions), which thet meet on their daily paths.

- City organization’s need to get directed quality feedback from the community that really likes to help the city to make it’s infrastructure better for cycling. No duplicate issues, since the already reported issues and the replies are visible for other users.

- Navigation and issue reporting in one place – easy to remember – mobile

Similar apps in the market
- http://www.mobiilikunta.fi/
- http://metro.fi/fiksaus/
- www.fixmytransport.com/


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Jaakko	
October 11, 2013, 1:09 pm   /  Reply	

It is a very good idea to have a service with a specific topic and community in mind. This allows you to tailor the best experience for that specific purpose. A dedicated community like cyclists could be used to identify real problems and only report those to city. What is causing city’s personnel a lot of work is unaccurate feedback, for example location is not correct.

Other thing which causes a lot of work are issues which do not belong to city at all and still are reported to city. By focusing on a specific area like cycling allows you to use data sets like cycling routes for making the feedback reporting more accurate. Having also a route planning feature makes it even more possible to use these kinds of data sets.

Images are very important to include in order to have better understanding on the problem. We’ve noticed that apps developed on HTML5 may have problems uploading images to services.

All in all, good idea and we are looking forward on your work!

Best Regard, Jaakko Rajaniemi
jaakko.rajaniemi@hel.fi