The first phase of the free-to-use My Smart City service delivery platform, which allows citizens to report potholes, monitor power or water outages and communicate with local municipal officials, besides other activities, has been launched in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

“My Smart City is giving South Africans a voice to see the resolution of service delivery issues and to allow them to view issues and log incidents, prioritise them and connect with the right service providers to resolve them,” says software development company Acumen Software CEO Joao Zoio.

“We believe the platform has the potential to 'Uber-ise' service delivery by putting the power in the hands of citizens who use the platform. In time, the platform will also create jobs for thousands of citizens and private contractors.”

Eventually, residents will also be able to source private services, manage crowd-funding initiatives and gain access to community social and sporting events.

“The platform will allow citizens, city officials, councillors and service providers to engage in a safe and controlled environment with the sole purpose of improving services in the city,” says Acumen Software COO Kennedy Mogotsi.

The My Smart City platform has already been integrated into the City of Cape Town’s call management system with the intention being connecting all municipal systems to enable the automation of information flows from citizens.

Where the My Smart City platform has not been granted access to interface with municipal systems, Acumen Software’s dispatch centre team will become the conduit between citizens and their municipalities to ensure issues are appropriately logged and tracked.

The mobile and desktop digital platform was developed by Acumen Software, which secured private equity investment from financial services firm Capitec-backed Imvelo Ventures and wood-fibre products multinational Sappi-funded Andzani Ventures, which was used to fund the development and launch of the platform.

My Smart City is calling on all Johannesburg and Cape Town residents to register and create profiles on the platform and to invite family, friends and neighbours to join them in becoming active citizens with strong voices. The more subscribers the platform has, the greater the power of citizens to affect change and improvements in their city.

Acumen Software has a strong record in several South African cities through its mobile field service management solution Forcelink.

Forcelink is used by the City of Cape Town to manage the MyCiTi bus infrastructure, as well as by the City of Johannesburg’s City Power to manage outages and maintenance work on its electricity network.

Forcelink has extensive application programming interface to interface with other systems such as enterprise resource planning, customer relation management, accounting systems, project management, equipment monitoring with supervisory control and data acquisition and Internet of Things, among others.

“My Smart City is set to change the way in which citizens, businesses, community groups and public sector service providers communicate and collaborate within their wards. The one-stop-shop for city residents aims to sign up four-million registered users by bringing citizens and public service providers together through technology and it does not cost citizens or their cities a cent.”