IBM has released a social application for public control / monitoring of water supply (currently only in South Africa)

In my region, as in many others, often there are gusts of pipes through which cold / hot water flows. Such impulses, if they are small, the relevant services are in no hurry to eliminate. As a matter of fact, in Russia / Ukraine / Belarus no one is particularly worried about the loss of water. Probably because there is a lot of water (for the time being), and because those responsible are hard to find. Personally, I often think about how much good, clean water flows to nowhere as a result of such negligence. In countries where there is not much water, not one or two people think about this problem, they are trying to solve such problems and solve them quickly. In order to improve the control / monitoring of water supply in a country like South Africa, IBM has developed a special application for Android. With the help of this application, called WaterWatchers , any owner of an android-smartphone will be able to mark a problem area on the map (something like “RosYam”, only the direction is different).

True, the new service / application is only working in South Africa. In this country, according to statistics, only about 45% of households have access to quality drinking water, which can be called safe for health. And the South African government has stepped up efforts to address this issue.
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IBM offered its own solution, and it is really interesting. Report violations, monitor the quality of water supply in South Africa can now not only through the application, but also using sms, or work with the relevant section of the municipal site.

To facilitate the work of ordinary citizens, developers have tried to make the service / application interface as informative as possible, and, at the same time, with minimally loaded text. Everything is automated, you just need to take a photo and answer three not very difficult questions. After that, the information goes to the general database, and after appropriate processing, the information provided is added to the map.

The map is already used by municipal services, tracking the most problematic places, and trying to localize the problems that arise. Such a scheme of work will probably help not only to quickly localize problems with water supply (repair pipes, repair canals, etc.), but also save taxpayers money.



Previously, IBM had already released an application of this kind, which helped to track the status of park waters not in one and not in two regions, but in 25 countries (it all started from one city, San Jose, California). The CreekWatch application turned out to be very successful and in demand, so now the experience gained through CreekWatch has been transferred to the new application.

Of course, I would like these initiatives to work not only somewhere, but also at home. But somehow I can not believe that the domestic municipal services will work with a third-party service card. Although, who knows, after all, the same “RosYam” seems to be working effectively ...

Via sustainablebrands