OUTA launches service delivery app in Cape Town
Residents can now report service delivery issues directly to the City of Cape Town by clicking a button
Following months of development with municipalities and the City of Cape Town, OUTA has launched its highly efficient and effective mobile app for residents to report a range of incidents directly to the city’s operations centre – within a few seconds and via their smartphones.
Called the LINK App, which can be downloaded for free from Google Play and Apple App stores, residents no longer need to phone or e-mail the city’s call centre to report incidents such as potholes, traffic light outages, water leaks, sewage overflows, illegal dumping and a number of other incidents. The LINK App has been integrated with the City of Cape Town’s incident reporting system, which receives the information directly from the citizen in real time.
The LINK App uses smart technology that tags the exact geo-location, time and type of incident being reported, and allows the user to insert a text description and upload a photograph of the incident, if they wish. This in turn provides the city’s operational teams with all the details required to attend to the incident reported.
Furthermore, the LINK App has been designed with ‘incident grouping intelligence’ that ensures the city is made aware of each incident as a single matter, even though it may be reported multiple times by different residents. Users are encouraged to re-report prior incidents logged if these have not been attended to within 24-hours. Re-reporting improves the system’s power and artificial intelligence processes, which provides the city with reporting trends, along with information pertaining to repeat faults and areas of infrastructure decay.
“OUTA has developed the Link App as a free service to all residents, ward councillors and the City of Cape Town, as part of its quest to improve lines of communication and municipal service delivery in municipalities and cities throughout the country. The nice thing about this application is that it works across the country, in the same way, for every municipality,” says Julius Kleynhans, OUTA’s executive manager for its social innovation department. “We also commend the City of Cape Town for its progressive and cooperative approach, to enable the use of a civil society developed application to feed into its reporting systems.”
“In addition to the general reporting of faults and incidents whilst traveling around the city, residents also have the ability to upload their specific property and account details, which includes logging the non-collection of refuse on a designated day or informing the municipality of water and electricity faults specific to their home,” says Kleynhans.
“OUTA is a non-profit organisation and believes the development of seamless, time-saving and cost-effective technology, which is free to both the citizens and city management, will go a long way to improving service delivery and accountability in the public sphere. We will be opening the functionality of the LINK App for use within each metro and municipality, as and when these towns and cities have engaged with OUTA, to ensure there is correct protocol and system usage or integration applied in our efforts to help build SMART Municipalities,” adds Kleynhans.
How to download the LINK app
The free LINK app is available for Android and iOS devices and can be downloaded at https://download.linkapp.co.za/#dl, from the Google Play or Apple App Store.
Upon registration the app will request permission to access your location – which is important as it enables accurate location and time of incident reporting.
For more information, visit http://www.linkapp.co.za
Soundclip with comment from Julius Kleynhans here.
