GeoTrac

Public Space Issue Management
Report it!

About GeoTrac

Your Street, Community and Neighborhood are spaces that you are intimately concerned about. Tracking and reporting issues that crop up in your neighborhood is a step towards citizen responsibility and government transparency. GeoTrac is an issue tracking tool that allows a user to submit a problem online via the web or mobile phone and track the problem through to its completion. This tool will allow people to:

  • Add issues in a particular neighborhood via the web or phone
  • Track the status for each issue
  • Query issues by place, status, type, etc.
  • Get notifications when issues are updated

This is a project that can be potentially used by:

  • Community issue map maker (standalone service). Hosted service where anyone can sign on and create an issue map (or multiple). Could be white-labeled for use with existing sites.
  • Gov't agencies -- Agencies such as the DOT (or any DO*) could run their own instance to track their own issues.
  • Community Boards or BIDs -- similar to government agencies.
  • Independent site maintainers -- could install & customize a version for their own use

How do I use GeoTrac?

http://img.skitch.com/20090518-byjciuiqi5542jt4gerykggmt5.jpg

A GeoTrac project is intended to track real-world issues with a location and a photograph around a particular area of concern. A user takes a picture of their issue, notes the location (which may be included in the metadata of the photo), and sends it to their GeoTrac instance via the web or email. SMS & Twitter integration should be available soon.

Submit your issue via the web by clicking Report an Issue

- or -

Email your issue to geotrac [at] rock [dot] openplans [dot] org.

A concise title of the issue and the location are noted in the subject line (separated by the @ symbol), the description is the body of the email, and photos can be sent as attachments.

Email format: 

To: geotrac@rock.openplans.org

Subject: Pothole fatal for bikers @ 349 W12 Street NY, NY 



Reporting a pothole that seems to be really dangerous for most bikers going down this path. Please take a look at it.

Technology

  • GeoTrac builds on existing open source software, particularly a web application called  Trac which is used to manage issues in the development of open source software projects. In this sense GeoTrac can be seen as relating the distributed management of open source software to the built environment. As an enhanced wiki and issue (bug) tracking system for software development projects, Trac provides a good application foundation: user accounts, roles/groups, pluggable architecture, and the concept of issues and tasks with associated  workflows.
  • The  GeoTrac extensions provide the main functionality that has been added to the native Trac application.

Installation

If you want to install your own instance of  GeoTrac, please see the instructions on at  http://projects.openplans.org/GeoTrac/wiki/Install

Have fun!