Description
With the widespread use of smart phones, urban sensing using crowdsourcing is becoming an important tool for data collection. People centric participatory sensing has been developed as a means of collecting information from society at large scale using smart phones. City service departments can make use of people centric urban sensing by streamlining data collection of non-emergency complaints under the 311 services umbrella. This thesis proposes an end-to-end solution to incorporate participatory sensing while avoiding the pitfalls of traditional 311 services. It presents a framework to submit non-emergency complaints to city service departments implementing the people centric urban sensing paradigm through the use of smart phones and the latest web technologies. These superior technologies will ultimately enable the city service departments to improve the quality of the services they provide to citizens. Through the Mobile 311 framework, citizens are able to submit detailed non-emergency complaints by collecting multimedia and geo-tagging data about city service problems through their smart phones. As a server side solution, the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) and SugarCRM Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system are combined to streamline 311 services. The CMS collects the submitted data from user smart phone submissions and shares this data on a web portal with other citizens, city officials and other authorized users. The CRM is used as a case management solution and assists city staff to efficiently manage their workforce while resolving the complaints. Through this comprehensive framework the communication channel between citizens and city administrators is significantly improved and thus improves the overall civic experience.
