Sally Bracegirdle

Okay thanks. Hi everyone a bit of pressure being the first one after lunch. Yeah, we're so we're here with society works. I'm sally this is Matthew um and yeah, we've been invited to give a share a little case study on some of the work we've been doing with Buckinghamshire Council and KaarbonTech to really improve the reporting experience for members of the public when they're reporting problems to Buckinghamshire using our fix my Street Pro service um which is a digital service reporting tool for reporting things like potholes and broken street lights and trees, but for today we're gonna focus specifically on drainage issues. So when members of the public are reporting those using Buckinghamshire instance, fix my Street Pro and the data for which is held in the KaarbonTech system, so we're gonna take you through that that data flow, how that work, what that looks like for members of the public like you and me, if we're making those reports, what that looks like for Buckinghamshire and how it all fits together, so I'll give you a bit of, a bit of context um kind of set the scene for you on behalf of Buckinghamshire um and then I'll hand over to Matthew who will take you through more of the actual data flow, which you definitely don't want me to explain to you. Um Is it gonna work my fault? Sorry? Oh okay. Yeah, Perfect. So a bit of um sorry go on. Yeah, got it. Okay, perfect, so a bit of background um if you've never heard of society works where um we create digital services for local government and the wider public sector as well. And the common theme among everything we do is we're very citizen focused. So very all about usability for citizens and how they trying to kind of remove those obstacles that we've all faced when you're trying to report a pothole or you're trying to report, um I don't know, a blocked drain or a fallen tree or you want to make an application or something and it's all, it's all different, every system is different and it's not kind of that really kind of user friendly experience. Um so we try and do that and we work very collaboratively with councils to do that and Buckinghamshire being one of them. Um they get very involved in our roadmap, very similar to what Mark was saying about KaarbonTech, so very similar in that way and we are part of my society. So we're owned by my society, which is a civic technology charity, we've been around since 2003 and we are behind some very well loved civic services in the UK. So you might have heard of the likes of what do they know and write to them and they work for you. Um and of course fix my street. fix my street is the National Service where anyone can make any report regardless of whether, you know which council or highways agency is responsible for it. Um So you could go make a report about pothole right now and you wouldn't have to know which council it needs to be sent to and fix my street Pro kind of grew organically out of that councils like using it. Um So we wanted to give them the chance to use it as their own. So it's branded to look like it's their website and it fits very seamlessly with their existing website and existing services. Um and it integrates with whatever back end systems the council wants to use. So there's no kind of re keying and it removes that manual intervention uh and it really enhances the experience because that data can then be shared in a two way flow. Um So you as well as a citizen telling you about a problem, you can also tell them what's happening next with it and it makes it a bit more of a fulfilling experience. I talked about all about that citizen journey and making it um you know, more user friendly for them. We want to make it A more satisfying experience if you've gone to the trouble of making a report, you want to know what's happening next. You don't just want to send that report out into the ether and you never hear back about what happens. Um so that's that's a kind of brief introduction to fix my street pro and Buckinghamshire have been using fixed my street pro since 2018 now. So it's it's been in place for a few years um and they've been really integral to it, They've kind of, you know when I when I talked about we work collaboratively, we really do that's not just marketing speak and Buckinghamshire have been very involved in building on that road map with us. Um And they implemented it because they wanted to improve the user journey um and that customer experience um and it helps them do that in a number of ways, you know uses geolocation, you get nice accurate reports, you can upload photos with your report so you can, instead of just saying there's a pothole on the road you can take a picture of it sends it with that report um and it integrates um and with that integration in place it means that you can also send that information back like I said, so just to give you a bit of an idea of the landscape at Buckinghamshire, so they've got fixed the street on the front end, that's what, that's the reporting tool, that's what citizens are using, it's connected in to confirm. Um This is their new logo, I didn't know they had a new logo until the last minute. Um So they've got confirm their that's their back office environment and also KaarbonTech where of course they're storing all of the drainage information um I'm Buckinghamshire have kind of set, they would like to say they kind of set the golden standard for um pushing fix my street Pros flexibility and testing it and really seeing what can we do with these integrations um because uh so well I'll give you an idea. This is a an example of Buckinghamshires fix my street pro, I've I've just randomly selected a location on the map. Um So Buckingham, the explain these pins on the map to you. So the yellow ones represent reports have been made by citizens. Uh The green ones represent reports that have been fixed um and the little orange ones represent some scheduled maintenance works um And this is the sort of stuff that can be pulled in using an asset layer. We can do that because Buckinghamshire uses those integrations really wisely um and those orange pins work really neatly and that if if you were to go and try and report a pothole for example or a drain um and they've already said actually this this drain is gonna be fixed soon. Um you would just say it's okay you don't need to make, you don't need to make this report, it's going to be fixed soon anyway so a nice way to kind of reduce that contact volume. Uh An asset layers can be added for within reason, anything that you want using fixed. My street Pro depends all depends on the data. Like Mark was saying earlier depends on the data that's stored in your systems and the systems that you're integrating with? So obviously um with KaarbonTech, we've seen already just how much data there is and how you can use it. Um so for example, if you've dropped a pin here and you want to report the drainage issue, uh this is what you would see, so very similar to what you saw earlier, all of those um individual gullies represented on the map and in this case they're represented by these little yellow um these little yellow pins on the map um and these are uh initially pulled in using a WFS endpoint um that was hosted by us um and supplied through a a shape file from Buckinghamshire. Um and they, I mean, you know, this is a lot of information for citizens to understand, so we don't display it straight away, it depends on which category it relates to, so you've clicked, there's a blocked strain, you're seeing all of these individual assets um and it was about a year ago now, Buckinghamshire to us and said, okay, we've got these assets, were using KaarbonTech, we've got all this amazing data, can we display some of this back to the citizen, So you know, we're using it in this really cool way, can we can we kind of show this on the front end as well, without adding any complexity to that user journey and you're seeing a preview of it here, this Gully was last cleaned on the fourth of March. Um so, uh the challenge then was to understand, okay, how are we going to do this and why do we want to do it? And obviously for Buckinghamshire they want to show um what they're doing, we're giving more information, we're giving more of a snapshot of what's happening in this area, which reduces that contact volume. Um and it also again improves the experience for the citizen, they can see that, Okay, do I need to make this report? No. Um and just generally you feel like you're being given more information, nothing is being hidden from you, you're aware of what's going on. Um so to get started, we had to kind of, you know, work out that challenge of how we're gonna get fixed my street pro to work with confirm and KaarbonTech without adding that complexity um to the journey and make sure that citizens still enjoy that user experience that they've, that they've gotten used to. Um so about May last year, I think it was, we held a technical workshop with KaarbonTech and Buckinghamshire, um and we kind of set out the objectives that we wanted to get from it. So I've listed them up here, we wanted to fetch the last clean date for each gully um that's held within KaarbonTech, pull that through to fix my street, display it on the map in a way that uh, you know, isn't overbearing, but it looks nice and it's part of the process. Um it has to be specific to the gully you can't just have a, you know, an overriding date for everything but also uniform if some of them are cleaned on a similar day or a similar schedule. Um So yeah, we we got together, we worked on it Matthew was very involved in it. Hence why I'm going to hand over to him to take you through how that data flow actually ended up coming to be. Do you want me to carry on with this? Okay. I'll go meet I bit louder. Okay. Um Yes, this is a very simple overview of how fix my street pro talks to the various um services involved in what sally's just demonstrated to you. Um So there's a few moving parts but from the point of view of KaarbonTech, it's sort of quite straightforward in the street talks via a proxy server to KaarbonTech server to um when the right categories picked on the map as demonstrated um it fetches the junctions and the inspections from KaarbonTech server to display them on the map including the last clean date the backing you after. Um then we take the like the identity of the drain as well because the there's a, the important thing is that like the shared identifies the KaarbonTech, store the confirms asset um identified in its own system so that we can get that out and then when we feed that through um to Buckinghamshire the report into their confirm for someone to then investigate and look at um that we can include that information that Buckinghamshire have asked for um the open 31 adapter is sort of our little thing so we talked to many different back ends sadly said like confirm and um so on so we have sort of a, there is an international standard for reporting um we sort of tried to utilize as much as possible so that things can be consistent among the different back ends um and then the data flows both ways and that when the inspection confirmed gets updated by a member of staff going to look at it or whatever then we can pull that update out um back into the highstreet to display to the user the progress of their report and what happened there. Um and then the Buckinghamshire as I said we used to fetch the drain information from our own server with a copy of Buckinghamshires data but now we talked about KaarbonTechs always live and up to date um and not have done any manual intervention to to have live information. We still get our road like whether things are road or not from Buckinghamshire again for the same reasons. Um it would be good in the future to use more information from KaarbonTech if Buckinghamshire want to display or make things or or feed things directly into that if that's the way that Buckinghamshire would like to do things. Yeah, otherwise it's just like saying things, that's just what it looks like to the user when they picked, when they, when they're reporting a blocked drain. Um they see the last clean date and they can use that information to decide whether to continue or not um or to include in the report and that would be great to include more information about things that possible. That would be helpful to the users to decide about making their report. It's just another example. I think the same thing I realized I've switched myself off, Can you hear me again? We're not gonna feed back off each other. Um Yeah, that was just a separate example. Um but yeah, like Matthew said the kind of capabilities of it, the flexibility of it means that all of that data that we um that we were shown earlier could absolutely also be fed into this workflow to show to the citizen. Um This is a similar thing that we've already got in the um I mentioned earlier you can display those scheduled roadworks on the map. So if you were to try and make a report about something that the council already knows this needs fixing. So for example, you've got roadworks are scheduled near this location, You may not need to report your issue. Um and you can explain a bit more than that and it basically as much information as you want to share. You can do in a nice simple way. Um And again it's all connected so there's there's no manual intervention behind this, it's all connected to your systems. Um And then this is the functionality to um if you were interested in what happens next, you could subscribe to report. Um So for example if you were to report, try to report a blocked drain but you've seen, oh actually this is on a schedule to be cleaned soon so I I don't need to report this. If you were interested in it, you could subscribe to an existing report instead of re reporting it. Um I think does that cover that cover the functionality? Pretty much yeah. Um So that's a kind of whistle stop tour of how it works. Um Obviously we're speaking on behalf of Buckinghamshire but we'll do our best to fill in any blanks if you do have any questions about how it works. I believe our colleague Amelia has dropped some things on the tables so if you do have anything else. One of the things that I was going to pick up if you go back to your slide of the the way they're interacting. So most most people assume because confirm is going to be a central part of this. Everything's gonna go through, confirm. We're going to talk to confirm, confirm is gonna talk to fix my street fix my streets. Gonna talk doesn't need to be like that. So there was a bottleneck in this workshop when we had that conversation that confirm could not push the right information to fix my streets a restriction that confirmed just couldn't do it so but we couldn't bypass confirm on that development. So excuse me Doug for stealing some of your thunder there but it's just because you've got a diagram up there by just still feeding the information ourselves direct to fix my street meant that the public had the latest bit of information possible but confirm still got the information that it needed. So as it was a very simple process of understanding what a system needs at a given time, not just this needs to be integrated but what does confirm need, what you're getting out of it? What's the point of their, how regularly does it need? How much is a refresh and and that that was a real simple overcome that I think just fix the problem rather than people go well confirmed doesn't do it. Sorry, let's walk away from this point. It's been, it's been really, really beneficial And obviously we focus a lot on the citizen experience but Buckinghamshire at the last check in with them have now where they where report's been made using one of those assets they have reduced their duplicates down to about 0.5% because it's so accurate now on those individual assets and the way that data all feeds together. So yeah, it's been, it's been a really interesting project to work on. And I mean all morning we've looked at how much data there is and it has been nice to see how we can work together and feed that back. Um make it benefit citizens as well. Any questions, how are you managing, where you've got your assets that's fine, they can click on an asset and what are you doing with regards to how have you overcome where there isn't actually an asset in the database? So it could be, you know, we're not naive to believe that 100% of all these things are always 100% correct. So it's it's the option then for actually there is an asset that needs adding to it and how does that report to it? And also what has been putting players or have you had any instances where people are trying to report assets that aren't, the council's, you know, we regularly get a gully in a back street for example or a private street and things like that. Yeah, I'll do that one of the first on your first point. Um Yeah, it depends upon what the council has asked for, but in certain cases in some categories you can still go and make a report as long as they're back and can handle it, you can make a report without assigning it to an asset um you know, peter for for example, they their back end coming, what is now, it doesn't matter their back end, it does require an asset, but they set up a special category for you to report, report the same sort of thing, but there isn't an asset shown on the map today, you carry on with that sort of thing. So yeah, we're all constrained a bit by the back ends in that sense. Um because I think some of them, like someone won't accept report without signing it confirms okay, but I think there was somewhere where it's not so good. Um but yeah, we have always found that. And then on the second point, yes, if the data's there, certainly we just with oxygen, we've just been working on, they just moved their street lighting to alloy. Yeah, from may rise, I think it was. Um and so as part of that, they've now got whether the streetlights are private street lights or public street lights as part of the assets now. So we query that at the point when we um so when you show the assets, we can mark them differently. Some councils of light lights, different colors or different size, different things. And then when you click it, can tell you this is a private street light ideally, if the information is available, tell them who to contact instead. If there's a problem with that street light and try and redirect them there. Uh in some cases that data is not available. So we just tell the user that the council can't accept the report, there's nothing they can do about it. But again, as with earlier the more data we've got, the more good things we can do with it. So on the bucks system can they plot a gully so or do they have to select a gully? I think I think you can you have to check, it would just be interesting to see that day to come through how many times how many reports have been plotted that we're not against the gully and were therefore needed to be investigated. It might be simply it might just be the, you know, they didn't get the concept of clicking on a dot as might be the case or it might be an area for creation of an inventory. But it's certainly it's a good point. One more question on the information that was displayed on the screen, showing that when the was last cleaned. Does it also display or pull through information from KaarbonTech to show that? Yes, we cleaned it. But sorry lads, it still doesn't work. So in actual fact showing that it was cleaned two months ago but if it's still defective and therefore it's still blocked their complaint would be still valid. Does it pull that information through? I can't remember the exact logic. I think there is something that does check some carpet data about whether it was actually cleaned or not as to what is actually showing it's like whatever bucks asked us to do, but it certainly could do that if that was a requirement because as long as the data is there, it's annoyingly it's been held back a bit. So the technology is there. But there's generally a fear of putting information in the public domain. There's an obvious fear around we have our own public interface and we were always stripping it back to say, well don't show this or do show that. Well, this could actually entice more problems than it's worth. So that's generally the restriction that you're facing here rather than the tech. But the simple answer is it could it could show it if you wanted to and it can also display updates from Buckinghamshire so they could control how much information you wanted to share. So you don't have to give them the full cleaning information. You could just give them an update to say inspector went out and looked at it and something will happen and I don't know x amount of time without committing too closely and causing more problems. Ask another question. Oh my microphone. There's a, you give me right now, that's done sorry. Is there any other authorities using that setup and what integration costs? Obviously got two systems there with them integration. So I'm just wondering what kind of costs that do with clean streets. I think we've got three, I think three councils, we do some sort of KaarbonTech train integration. Oxfordshire might be one of them as well. I think Oxford on the journey um journey in terms of costs, I think you get like a number of integrations within your within a council when they come to us for whatever, there's the number integrations are included within that um and then we work, we work with the council for whatever is best for whether they wish to display and show, sorry, I was going to say Amelia is definitely the one to talk to about this. She knows all back to front but yeah, it's all packaged up depending on what you need because obviously every council is different so a smaller council isn't going to need a huge amount of integration and a huge amount of asset layers so it just depends on what you need basically from our side of things for the second time today I'm going to actually be able to say that our side is free so it doesn't matter, it is a live feed that's already been pushed up there piggy back in so there is no integration costs from our end. Super. Sorry, in terms of the accuracy of the reporting Buckinghamshire said that most of their residents are able to identify their asset on that kind of mapping. Yeah, so when we last caught up, which was quite recently, it was only a couple of months ago, they analysed some of their data, I wish I'd been able to share some of it with you. But the reduced certainly in terms of duplicate reporting, it dropped by 99.5%. So, and when they analysed reports that citizens were members of public were selecting those specific assets. So rather than just saying there's a blocked drain on whatever Middleton street or wherever and it's a bit ambiguous because which drain do you mean they could take a photo of it and select the asset, take a photo of it and then you've got that nice package to more easily triage that issue and that context that was accurate? Yeah, I'm sure they'd probably be happy for us to put you in contact with them. If you're interested in. Most people can't read a map, trying to find a gully on a mapping layer when they can't read a map of following instruction is really impressive. Yeah, we're doing some work with buckets at the moment on, especially with parish councils to do things with more better direction of reports that their responsibility based on where you click on the map because I think in Buckingham, if the speed limit is greater than 30 miles an hour, it's the council, the county council unitary council now responsibility. Whether it's under, it needs to go to the parish council to deal with within the area. So we're doing things to do with that. Um Can I just ask when the reports are made, are they all anonymous? Ah No, that anonymous is a that's optional. Councils can either say yes, we will allow anonymous reporting. They don't have to Matthew might be better. Again, it's quite flexible like council council council can choose to allow fully anonymous reporting or not and then the user can choose to be anonymous or not when they're making the report, just a supplementary. When authorities have their own online reporting systems and there's the potential for conflict between a system such as this and that authorities own online reporting system. Have you found any issues there? Because there are some experiences whereby fix my street is being used when the council has its own online reporting system and then there can be challenges sometimes quite public ones whereby if the report on fix my streets not being picked up but the actual authorities online reporting systems being used, things are being dealt with. But clearly the authority doesn't want to feedback loops. So, are you noticing any of that type of conflict? Well, if it's in Buckinghamshire fix my street pro is there reporting service so that there is no conflict and obviously fix my street is that's part of the charitable side of the organization, so that runs us the national Service. So I think yes, there probably is conflict there. If those two are working together but fix my street short, Matthew could tell you the ins and outs of how it works. It would we would do work with councils to say, well, we want to provide the service because citizens want an easy way to report things without needing to know. I mentioned the open three or one. There is an international standard for accepting reports and ideally any system. They don't obviously ideally anything would be able to accept reports via that standard and then that would be an easy way for us to to provide a better service that way.