Fix My Leith

For some time, Greener Leith has been quietly encouraging people to tackle local problems with their street or neighbourhood using the "Fix My Street" service provided by the non-proft organisation My Society at www.fixmystreet.com

We think this website is fantastic because it makes the process of reporting broken street lamps, litter, vandalism, graffiti and so on more open. These kinds of issues may seem trivial to some, but together issues of 'local environmental quality' make a big difference.

If everyone in Leith used this service to report problems we believe that we would all win:

• It means you don't need to work out who is responsible for fixing the problem - The website refers your problem to the right organisation automatically
  
• It would reduce duplicate reports to the organisations who fix problems
• It would give everyone (not just the service providers) a better idea of what the main problems are
• It would give everyone a better idea where problems happen
• It would encourage public debate over how solutions can be fixed 
• It provides better information to the service providers (you can submit photos in your reports) so your issue is more likely to be dealt with properly
  

Like lots of websites though - they only work if everyone uses them. Greener Leith likes to put its money where it's mouth is, so on Sunday evening we submitted this report to Fix My Street, about graffiti on Hawkshill Avenue. The report was forwarded straight away to the City of Edinburgh Council, so it will be interesting to see how long it will be before the graffiti is removed. 

However, Greener Leith hasn't stopped there. We've also set up a special page on our website at www.greenerleith.org/fix where you can see the last 10 issues in Leith that people have reported to Fix My Street, that will update automatically over time. You can see our graffiti report is currently top of the list, but we hope that it won't be at the top for long! 

Do you think this will encourage everyone to make more use of the Fix My Street website, and that it will be useful for people to see a sample of the most recent problems that are being reported?

Check out www.fixmystreet.com for yourself.