Who Runs This Site?

FixMyStreet Canada is maintained by the non-profit VisibleGovernment.ca.

The site was inspired by MySociety's example, which was adapted for Canada by Chris Taggart of OpenOttawa.

Why Isn't My Municipality Listed?

VisibleGovernment.ca is recruiting regional representatives to add new municipalities to our site. Regional representatives have the following responsibilities:

Initially

• Contacting your city councillor to obtain ward maps for your area.
• Supplying city councillor and/or 311 contact emails for issues in your city.

Ongoing

• Keeping councillor and contact information for your city up to date, for instance, after a municipal election.

If you are interested in becoming a regional representative for FixMyStreet.ca, please contact jennifer@visiblegovernment.ca.

Do you remove silly or illegal content?

FixMyStreet Canada is not responsible for the content and accuracy of material submitted by its users. All reports are accepted on the basis that they contain no illegal content, and we reserve the right to remove any problems or updates which we consider to be inappropriate upon being informed by a user of the site.

Who gets to see my email address?

If you submit a problem, we pass on your contact details, and details of the problem, to the municipality contact responsible for the area where you located the problem. When you submit a report or update, your name is displayed upon the site, but not your email address.

We will never give or sell your email address to anyone else, unless we are obliged to by law.

Will you send spam to my email address?

Never. We will email you if someone leaves an update on a problem you’ve reported, or subscribed to. We will also send you a questionnaire email four weeks after you submit a problem, asking for a status update.

We’ll only ever send you emails in relation to problems you have reported or subscribed to.

Is the software for fixmystreet.ca open source?

Yes, it is. The code is distributed under an MIT license, and is available for download here.

What ward map formats do you support?

In order to resolve street addresses with Google Maps, FixMyStreet.ca requires ward maps in a format based on geographic co-ordinates (lattidude and longitude).

We can easily import ward maps in the following formats:

• ESRI Shape Files
• TIGER Shape Files
• GML
• KML
• Postgres or MySQL SQL
• WKT 84 Polygons

If you have ward maps in other formats, please get in touch. We may be able to work something out.

Credits

Thanks to:

• MySociety, for the original concept.
• Chris Taggart, of OpenOttawa, for adapting the source code to Canada.
• Brad Elliott, of dyad infoSys, for the domain name.
• The City of Ottawa, for being open to new ideas.
• The Rae Family of Montreal, for hosting and IT support.

In addition, Chris Taggart would like to thank:

• Pierre Lewis, for his MTM conversion script. The script enabled conversion from Ottawa's MTM projection to the Google-friendly WGS-84 format.