Introduction

Dear Citizen of the World,

FixMyTown.com is the online space for activists who want to make the world a better place, a neighborhood at a time.

FixMyTown.com makes it easy for citizens to publicly post a non-emergency issue, in a way that all other citizens can see it, and thus encourage and assist the local authorities in identifying and solving small and large issues in a city.

We divide those non-emergency issues into two large categories. Those are the "BAD" and the "UGLY". The "BAD" are issues like a broken sidewalk. The "UGLY" are issues like pollution from a local factory.

Because it would be unfair to any city, to only show their bad (or ugly) side, we allow and encourage citizens to also post photos of the "GOOD" side of their city. Those could be landmark buildings, landscapes, nature, and any other photo that does not contain faces.

But I can hear you saying that your city already has an app that residents can use to report problems. Yes, but those apps require registration, they are complicated, but most importantly, they do not let all other residents of your city know that a problem was reported. As such, it takes some "friction" to report an issue, and there is no pressure on the city to fix the issue sooner vs later. Essentially, there is no "name and shame" aspect to those city-specific apps.

And yes, your city has a phone number that citizens can call and report an issue. But it is so much more efficient for the local authorities to review a photo and know exactly when and who to send to deal with the issue. This makes it much more efficient for the city to deal with issues.

And when the city fixes the issue, they can append comments and photos of the corrected issue and publicly get the credit they deserve for fixing issues.

Basically, FixMyTown aims to be the master list of all the location-related pending problems around the world, so we keep some gentle pressure on all involved to do more.

We also encourage users to submit articles about solutions to problems. Those articles can be about "life skills" or "best practices".

"Life skills" is about the knowledge modern citizens need to navigate the complicated societies we now live in. We all need to know about loans, fixed vs floating interest rates, buy vs rent, attend to college or not, whether to start a business or not, taxes, investments, insurance, how to learn new material, how to "read a room", how to interact with others, etc.

"Best practices" is about smart ways that politicians and officials, in other parts of the world, used to solve problems. The United States alone has more than 90,000 (ninety thousand) governments. So most likely some other government in the world has already dealt with whatever issue troubles our local government.

In short, we can all benefit from "stealing" good ideas from others.

But secretly I hope FixMyTown becomes even more positively relevant in your life.

FixMyTown can be a social network where instead of following friends or celebrities, you follow one or more geographical regions.

Because you can locate on a map, what others have posted, you can think of FixMyTown as a town square where all opinions are voiced publicly, thus creating a more lively but healthier environment.

By "healthier" I refer to the avoidance of what social scientists long ago named "confirmation bias".

Essentially, when people only talk to others just like them, it leads to extremism, because people get the very wrong idea that "everybody" in the world agrees with them.

The web and all that interconnectivity that came with it, actually made it easier for extremists to obscurely meet other extremists in distant places, and one can argue, made the problem worse.

I recall back in 1995, during the very early days of the web, while working for a major investment bank in New York City, attending a seminar about the web presented by Esther Dyson.

As a matter of fact, I was a bit irritated why they were forcing me to attend this seminar. In my view, as a young programmer on the trading floor, I knew all my FTPs, HTTPs, HTMLs, TCP/IPs, C++, etc. and there was nothing else to learn!

But what I heard that day shocked me. Ms Dyson made it clear that in the future this "confirmation bias" was going to be an "unintended consequence" and it would cause many problems, and it has.

And this was not the first time, our communities in recent decades, took a turn for the worse.

As strange as it may sound, the introduction of air conditioning and television into our homes, took us away from our front porches, verandas, balconies or sidewalks and into our living rooms, thus disconnecting us from our neighbors.

And it gets worse. Nowadays, every big company on the web seems to be using algorithms to decide what to show us.

As a result, they always show us the same things. Even if we try to find something else, they persistently return us to the same things. As such, our "personalized-without-our-explicit-permission" web is getting smaller and smaller.

This is because, to those large companies, we are the product and not the customer. They track us across unrelated websites and try to sell us to their real customers, the advertisers.

Advertising per se is not bad. The problem is that those large web companies try to maximize financial results from everything we do on the web, thus forcing down our throats the same material.

At FixMyTown, we promise that you will be the customer and not the product.

We do not track you. You are not for sale.

So, FixMyTown.com and the FixMyTown app is an effort to encourage people to interact more with their communities in a public way, (but from the comfort of their living room!), while treating the members of the community with the respect we all deserve.

Please join us.

Savas Savvides

CEO

Webium LLC

Legal Details

This app does not track you in any way. We do not access or store any data that identifies you or your device.

We do though store the date, time, and geographical location of your phone, only because we assign a date, a time, and a location to a reported issue.

Since we make use of third-party tools (such as mapping APIs from Google and/or other mapping API providers, or cloud storage by Amazon and/or others) most likely those companies store your IP address.

If you are worried about your IP address, you can use a VPN service to add an extra degree of difficulty.

We store a value on your local browser, so next time you visit FixMyTown.com, the map will show the last area you viewed. We do not correlate that value to any other information that we might have on you, such as an email address.

Your images and text will be posted at http://www.FixMyTown.com as a clickable pin on a world map.

Once your pin is publicly posted, others can add comments and images.

We expect that any “Content” you upload (including sounds, photos, text, video, and graphics) to FixMyTown.com is original and that you have the rights to it. When you upload your content to FixMyTown.com, you are granting us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licenseable, and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and even the right to create “derivative works” from the content. You’re also granting other users of FixMyTown.com the right to use, reproduce, distribute, display, and perform such Content as permitted through the functionality of the Service. The license is perpetual and irrevocable, and we can keep copies of everything you upload forever on our servers, even if you delete it.