SeeClickFix position themselves as a platform that facilitates communication between government and citizens. Their website states that “SeeClickFix is a communications platform for citizens to report non-emergency issues, and governments to track, manage, and reply–ultimately making communities better through transparency, collaboration, and cooperation.”
Looking at its functionality, the website incorporates elements of gamification by giving points to people for reporting, commenting and voting on issues, and displays point totals next to profile names in the “Neighbors” section. For positive reinforcement it assigns a whimsical “rank” based on point totals, such as “Digital Superhero,” “Municipal Avenger,” and “Civic Crusader.”
Signing up for the website reveals that user accounts are essentially anonymous – they only require an email address and a made up screen name. New users are also prompted for their nearest street intersection, but can click anywhere on a map. While anonymity is an effective method of “bracketing” identities and giving everyone an equal voice, it also makes it harder to regulate abusive behavior that could undermine the civility and effectiveness of the platform. Nancy Fraser’s critique of Habermas also raises questions about whether bracketing identity is a good thing by arguing for the importance of understanding someone’s lived experience to redress historical imbalances in power and communication flows.
In The Wealth of Networks Yochai Benkler describes of how the networked public sphere differs from the public sphere that was made possible by commercial mass media. He states that the qualitative change “is represented in the experience of being a potential speaker, as opposed to simply a listener and voter. It relates to the self-perception of individuals in society and the culture of participation they can adopt” (2). To apply this to SeeClickFix we would have to ask whether the platform encourages or allows more people to speak about community issues. On one level the website is essentially no different than calling up your local public works or transportation department. It does not create a new area of citizen/government interaction, it just moves an existing path of communication online.
Because user accounts can be anonymous, perhaps SeeClickFix is indeed a place where more people feel comfortable participating in the public sphere. Using the phone to call a city department may seem outmoded or even intimidating to some people, and caller ID may make anonymous calls impossible. Does this make the website successful in opening up the public sphere? One big constraint is how cities respond to problems. Boston and Cambridge are a good example. Boston appears to monitor the site daily and creates problem tickets in their own computer database for each problem. They report updates on the problem in the comments section. The City of Cambridge appears to occasionally lurk on the site. Occasionally they leave a comment, but it is unclear whether the website is an effective and consistent way to communicate with city employees.
Whether the website is an example of Tim O’Reilly’s “government 2.0” is therefore partly dependent on how specific governments treat the platform. Boston seems to monitor SeeClickFix constantly, so it probably does create an inclusive communication channel to solve collective problems, especially with their policy of posting service request ID numbers and updating issues when they are resolved. But this doesn’t happen when a city like Cambridge seems to mostly ignore it or occasionally lurk.
But SeeClickFix doesn’t actually change the delivery model of government services. Government isn’t “a convener and an enabler” with this website. Government is not managing a marketplace, or using open standards, or building a simple system, or enabling data mining or experimentation. SeeClickFix takes the simple task of reporting a problem to your city and moves it online. This probably leverages the networked public sphere to create a more transparent and participatory process, but it doesn’t represent a radical rethinking of government, as O’Reilly urges us to do.
Some people used SeeClickFix to ask the community for help digging cars out of the snow. They generally got responses and people posted updates when the the problem was fixed. This type of ad hoc community help isn’t a use case the website designers probably planned for, but it does demonstrate the potential upside of creating a website for people who are interested enough in their community to report problems, and seems to be a real world instance of the “digital superheros” the site wants us to aspire to be.