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Hello I think I have a nice idea to implement for human kind goodness. I call it FixTheUnFixed.

The idea goes like this, imagine you are driving or traveling all over the world and when you see some obstacle or damage - broken light, trash covering the street or any other problem you would like the responsible authority to fix it.

All you have to do is twit it, maybe add a photo, and of course provide the location using the inherit location service of twitter or Facebook.

     @FixTheUnFixed there is broken fire hydrant here
     @FixTheUnFixed my cellular company charged me 18,572$
       for using my iPhone aboard.

I thought a lot about how to process the messages. The most frequent issues that will come up are municipality concerns and I would like them to receive that location either by a retwit or an email.

My two ideas for getting this address are by googling it (with google API) or just make a regular query mentioned in this pseudo Algorithm:

       1. get the location from the Twitter or Facebook status that was sent from.
       2. look for key words such as trash, cats, animals etc.
       3. find the relevant authority e-mail, twitter or Facebook account.
       4. send the message to the authority account and retwit it to the public
          world so they can follow if there is any cahnge.

In the third step, is there any smart way to implement it? I didn't find any good way to do this! I don't want to spam the authorities or publish spam of sneaky people.

  • How can I improve the algorithm?
  • How can I search for the communication resources of the relevant authorities?

Thanks

originally asked here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8393424/how-to-improve-my-algorithm-for-analyzing-twitters-messages-from-users

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  • Sounds like an interesting application, but I think without some kind of feedback loop (->ticketing system) it would only be of limited use. Good luck getting authorities to cooperate :-/ Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 9:07
  • Not an answer as such but have you checked out www.FixMyStreet.com Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 13:48
  • it is indeed bery similar but my idea is much more simple for the people you just have to twwit insted of get into the site url and take a pic and describe where is it etc. in my vision all you have to do is : @ fixtheunfixed my girlfirend @name_of_her doesn't call me and she will get a flowers to here account and we gonna tell her you loves her :) i'll contact them and maybe we will do something together Commented Dec 7, 2011 at 15:28

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I don't know if an algorithm can solve all of that. I would preprocess the information as good as possible and then "crowdsource" the rest.

Especially the step where you are checking for spam and matching messages to relevant authorities look like something that need some sort of human interaction.

Finding relevant authorities will probably also be really hard and only solvable by a (trusted) user. I tried to report a broken traffic light once and it took me 15 minutes to find the right contact.

With that you are of course facing another set of problems: community building, trusted users, etc.

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