Issy-les-Moulineaux: Engaging citizens thanks to satellite navigation

Smart Issy

Issy-les-Moulineaux is a French city of about 65,000 inhabitants. The city is specialised in innovation and new technologies. Indeed the ICT sector offers 60% of the jobs within the city. Issy-les-Moulineaux’ Living Lab strategy currently aims to involve citizens and companies in the innovation process, to test and to unroll new services.

The Challenge

With the ubiquity of connected devices and social media, citizens were asking for more efficient ways of communicating with their city services than phone calls or emails. City administrations on the other hand also needed to improve and modernise their traditional tools for dealing with citizens’ requests.

Issy-les-Moulineaux therefore felt the need to keep up with these new ways of interaction and started looking for an efficient solution to better involve citizens in their city management.

To do so, Issy-les-Moulineaux joined the European project “RADICAL” in 2013, aiming at enhancing smart cities capacities. Indeed, in this framework, Issy-les-Moulineaux had to implement a service to encourage and facilitate information exchange and dialogue between the city and its citizens.

The Satellite Solution

Tell My City is composed of two complementary services. On the one hand, citizens can use a smartphone app based on satellite navigation or a dedicated website. To report a problem, make suggestions or congratulate the city for an initiative, citizens just need to pin the item on a virtual map, and attach a comment to it.

The dedicated city services then receive the messages directly on an online platform. Thanks to the phones’ embedded satellite navigation, the city services can precisely locate the issues and re-organise the intervention teams more effectively.

The citizens can follow the status of their request on the app, until it has been dealt with. Internally, the administration also monitors the performance of its services, such as reactivity, via a dashboard.

The results

After a one-year test by city employees and community centres, Tell My City was officially launched in September 2015 and citizens showed to highly appreciate it through a huge participation. In addition to strengthening the links between Issy-les-Moulineaux and its citizens, Tell My City allows the city to better understand their needs. The application also helps improve the city services efficiency, while lowering administrative costs.

 “TellMyCity is an innovative and effective tool to let Citizens communicate with their City” Issy-les-Moulineaux administration