It’s been two years in the making (see this post from August 2017 to read about its roots), but the MyCity app is finally here!
You, too, can download MyCity
The idea for the MyCity app was born two years ago, during a #MadeinJLM #HackJLM hackathon event. At the all-night event, activists from the Little Prince, together with a ‘group of techies’ as we called them then, teamed up to sketch out an idea. The breakthrough that night was the understanding that the app must be as simple as possible (the KISS approach). While other apps, including the Municipality’s, were time-consuming and complicated (requiring a lot of text about location, personal details, a long form, etc.), MyCity was to be as simple as the conventional camera app. You point at the target – a pile of garbage, a garbage can that is overflowing, etc., and click. The app does the rest: it sends the picture to the server with the coordinates, time and the identity of the already registered sender.
It took a while to find the entrepreneurs who would make it work, but now, a beta version of the app is here! One of the important uses of this application is for a series of pictures. You can be walking on the street or in the park and just point-and-click at every point-that-should-be-cleaned. The server can make this series of pictures into one report (“list of problems on X street, or in Y park) that can be sent to the relevant municipality official. Another interesting use is when you pass the same filthy spot on your way to work or school every day, you can take a picture each day. The server is able to create a time-based report, (“Corner of X and Y streets, from October 1 – 31”) which can also be reported to a municipal official, asking for a sustainable systemic response. The Municipality’s app can’t – there you need to file separate reports for each location and time and fill a form before sending. There is no way to understand the context of the report – the other parts of the park or the history of the spot. Even before this novel app was out, you could see Jerusalemite activists creating ‘garbage stories.’ (Want to see examples of successful local ‘Garbage Stories’? See this post about MiniActive’s successes in East Jerusalem.)
Here’s the Facebook (in Hebrew) post from the Little Prince Facebook group:
Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation and the Rayne Foundation for their support of the Little Prince.
