Have you ever been caught unawares because of unexpected council works underway? You may have been caught in traffic because of a burst pipe, tried to have a shower only to find that there was no water, or access your street to find that council have dug up the road due to an issue and its closed to local traffic only. Perhaps the council shutdown notification went missing or perhaps the works were urgent due to a burst pipe or any other number of inconvenient occurrences due to lack of information about works in progress that impact your access to important services.
This project is to design an app that uses open data to provide real time notifications about works underway, water works, sewerage works, electrical works or any other type of works.
The app is also designed to be easy to use for the council staff who are performing the works. Once the urgent or general works are finished, the council worker simply logs into the app, specifies the job number that is related to the works and then says the works are finished. What then happens, is that everyone who received an urgent or general works notice, receives a works completed notice restoring their water or other utilities that may have been affected.
Councils could include it as an add in into software used by council workers. This way people could be sent an email or SMS as soon as work commenced and completed.
What could happen, is that when the call is placed by a member of the public that there is an issue such as a sewerage or water main bursting, then the person from council taking the call would immediately be aware of the address details and could send out the first notification via text to all people who live in the street/area or the businesses which may be affected. This is real time knowledge!
This app is based on data provided by Queensland road closures data and published data by utilities providers within South East Queensland (some of which is open data and some of which is not yet open but should be) but the concept could be popular across the state or nationally in all councils.
