Business all around the world provide great service to their customers and the customers have grown accustomed to engaging with private companies in an interactive and personalized manner – as a citizen, they increasingly expect the same type of engagement with government agencies. Citizens are looking to work with the government on how to approach problems, develop policies/programs, receive services, create collaborative online as well as in-person relationships, and employ new modes of direct interaction.
Digital technologies can provide the channels that bring citizens and governments to come close to “co-create” programs. Such opportunities leverage citizen service improvements like enhanced service delivery and better customer experience based on citizen-centric design — approaches that enable self-service, real-time assistance, and personalized transactions.
According to Center for Digital Govt – Citizen Experience is one of the top priorities for city, county, and state government.
Civic engagement is not new. The early work by Robert Chambers, “The Origins and Practice of Participatory Rural Appraisal and Michael Cernea’s “Putting People First” date from 1980s and early 90s and were quite inspirational and so far ahead of its time.
However, we need to go beyond citizen engagement and rethink our very model of governance. More specifically, we need to move beyond traditional models of governance — where citizen input is received just once per election cycle, or sometimes not at all.
That is where we come in. Our Government Citizen Interacshn (GCI) product provides civic engagement where citizens and govt can have a two- way communication. One example would be if a citizen has a complaint or simply need to reach out, they can fill out a form and be able to check the status of their complaint as to if an inspector or an agency personnel is assigned or what the inspector has found out.
When a complaint comes in, an inspector is assigned using various criteria. An inspector or an agency personnel has a mobile app for documentation mgt so they can go green. They don’t need to carry any papers and they can fill out a form online or offline. They can use mobile device camera to take pictures of any document and store it in time and date stamped.
The product provides transparency to citizens thus boosting their confidence in government. It provides 2-way communication. Local governments often have a more significant impact on the lives of their residents and voters than state or even the Federal government. With the ability to impact people’s day-to-day lives and quality of life, it is essential for citizens to be engaged members of the public dialogue and decision-making process, thus GCI is even more important in local and city government.
For cities, counties, villages, towns, and other municipalities, fostering a sense of civic engagement means encouraging residents to be morally and civically responsible members of the community. It means encouraging idea sharing, participation in community improvement projects, and even reporting broken streetlights and down tree branches to local leaders—simply because residents care about their quality of life (QoL) and want to increase their community.