John Gallagher of the Free Press explains how people with a smartphone and special app soon will be able to help the city of Detroit stay on top of its blight-removal efforts by snapping shots of derelict properties and texting them to a public database.
The Motor City Mapping database is going public next week.
Gallagher writes:
By potentially enlisting thousands of Detroiters in the effort to keep the new database current, the developers hope to take a tool that’s already good and make it great. Staffers from the nonprofit Data Driven Detroit and the consulting firm Loveland Technologies, which created the database, will start training community activists and others to contribute new information about neighborhood properties.
The technology in effect launches an interactive conversation between city officials and citizens over the condition of each of Detroit's 380,000 parcels.
The effort has added a new word to Detroit’s lexicon — “blexting” — to describe the act of sending in a new photo and survey data to the central team to add to the database.
