The app is not so much about potholes themselves, but more about how transparency is needed to measure success or failure to provide services to citizens. Too often, reports just disappear into a back-end system and no-one sees the full picture, nor how the resolution rate is progressing.
Seeing municipal services are actually public funded services for citizens, I really wonder why not all electrical, roads, water, etc requests are not publicly visible for citizens to judge how their service delivery is going. If this could have been done for the Municipal Money website in South Africa, why not for other municipal services too? Right now, anyone can compare one municipality with another for their financial key performance indicators.
Maybe what is needed is more transparency for citizens to see what is going on, or not, with their municipal service delivery. Then we'll at least be dealing with objective judgements around service delivery, and be able to measure real improvement.
See
https://mybroadband.co.za/news/motoring/532545-south-african-app-receives-46693-potholes-reports-7842-have-been-closed.html#
technology #
SouthAfrica #
potholes #
accountability
