Atos Origin North America: Fort Wayne Recycling App

Monday, November 29, 2010

Fort Wayne Recycling App

10,000 sign up for 1-cart recycling using local gov web app:

The City of Fort Wayne was looking to gather information to help them make their change to their Recycling process more efficient. They asked Atos Origin to create a web application “The City of Fort Wayne Recycle Cart Registration” that would allow the citizens to enter data and then compare it against the City/County data to produce an all-inclusive report of addresses and requested cart size. With this the City is able to route the delivery of the new carts to save time and money. As well as provided an opportunity for the City to use media to get the citizens more involved with the daily workings of the City government.

The web application takes advantage of the Allen County GIS system (iMap) and the Allen County Treasurers Public Access Tax Information application (PATI). When a user enters an Address the Recycle Application checks the GIS address points to insure a valid address has been entered. Valid addresses are passed against GIS layers to ensure the address is inside the City Limits, is in a valid recycling district, and has the proper zip code. We use web services from PATI to try and pre-populate the users First and Last name based on property owner information. We store users Name, Address, Email, Phone Number, Requested Cart Size, and Recycling District information in a SQL backend completely accessed via Rest Web Services. The User Interface was developed using Microsoft Silverlight.

A working Windows Phone 7 mobile application was also developed but not released to the public. We are actively experimenting with development on popular mobile platforms such as Android, Apple iOS and the newly released Windows Phone 7. Mobile applications offer a lot of promise for making government services accessible to the citizens in a quick, convenient and efficient way.