We've already written about several city governments' technology-enabled efforts to keep in touch with citizens, including Love Lewisham, Derby Kidz Talk and Neighbourhood Fix-It. Such web-, MMS- and 311-based efforts may have since become more common, but San Francisco is the first city we've seen to accept citizen complaints and reports via Twitter.

Early this month San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom announced that San Francisco residents can now send messages to the city government via Twitter by directing them to @SF311. Customer service representatives are available 24/7, 365 days a year, for help with such matters as the need for street cleaning, graffiti removal, potholes, abandoned vehicles and garbage can maintenance. Users simply sign up to follow SF311, which will automatically result in a reciprocal follow connection. Photos and links to illustrate the subjects of complaint are encouraged, and the city also plans to send updates about planned and unplanned local events using the platform. San Francisco is using Twitter business platform CoTweet to track its Twitter-based conversations, according to TechCrunch.

It's good to see governments catching up with the communication preferences of their citizens. More to follow soon, we have no doubt! ;-)

Website: sftwitter.sfgov.org/twitter
Contact: @SF311

Spotted by: TechCrunch

We recently covered a program at Oakland Mall that offers startups low-cost and short-term leasing to help them to set up shop. This summer, KiosKiosk will bring a similar idea to the streets of London by offering a small kiosk space to startups selling ceramics, art, fashion and other creative products. At no cost to its temporary tenants.

Creative organisations, businesses or individuals ready to trade simply send in their details and explain why they're a good candidate to fill the space. KiosKiosk's founders note that, although the number of people enrolling in design courses in the UK increases each year, it's difficult for creative businesses to find affordable retail space in locations with enough foot traffic to attract potential buyers. The initiative is backed by the London Sustainable Development Commission, working to promote creative independent shops instead of more dime-a-dozen souvenir stalls. The first KiosKiosk—an eyecatching design by Geraldine and Wayne Hemingway—will be set up outside London’s City Hall all summer, with plans to roll out the concept in other parts of the city and country at a later stage.

As well as encouraging startups and up-and-coming designers, the kiosk is a low-cost way for London to showcase the abundance of local creativity to visitors from around the world.

Website: www.kioskiosk.co.uk
Contact: www.kioskiosk.co.uk/html/contact-us.html

Spotted by: intelligentnaivety.com via Raymond Kollau

P.S. On a side note: back in 2004, our sister-site trendwatching.com coined the phrase pop-up retail, and one of the examples used was Delta's pop-up store in New York. Five and a half years later, Southwest Airlines is opening a pop-up lounge in Bryant Park, as reported by nytimes.com. Southwest is starting service at LaGuardia, and the "Southwest Porch" will be serving sandwiches themed to the cities they'll be flying to. Some trends just never grow old ;-)

When it comes to monitoring the workings of democracy, there's no such thing as too much information. Helping involved citizens stay well-informed, LegiStalker filters US legislative news 24 hours a day.

Created as an entry for the Apps for America contest, LegiStalker allows users to search for legislators by name or location, and view live streams of their votes, Twitter posts, YouTube videos, favourite words and more. The website's database is updated every 20 seconds using Yahoo Search, GovTrack.us and other services. Plans are in place for additional features like voting histories and grouping politicians mentioned in the same news articles.

As LegiStalker says: “an accountable government requires an informed citizenry.” One to duplicate for dedicated citizens in other nations? (Related: Tweets from parliament seats — Crowds make parliament videos searchable.)

Website: www.legistalker.org
Contact: legistalker@forumone.com

Spotted by: Judy McRae

The downside of a great hotel is that it makes it too easy for a traveller to stay inside and miss out on experiencing the local culture. The Austrian city of Linz is tackling that issue by scattering unique individual hotel lodgings throughout the city’s metropolitan area, in effect turning the entire city into a one large hotel—a Pixelhotel.

The Pixelhotel project is one of the city’s attempts, as 2009 European Capital of Culture, to lure tourists to Linz by using creative and sustainable approaches to architecture. The locations chosen for redesign are unorthodox, from a cabinetmaker’s workshop and a ship to an art gallery. Each unique unit has its own specific aesthetic to make it a one-of-a-kind hotel experience. Lacking regular hotel infrastructure, the units provide minimal amenities only, as a way of encouraging tourists to go out and explore Linz. Prices range from EUR 87 for a single room to EUR 147 for a double.

Linz’s mini hotel ‘pixels’ aren't quite pop-up hotels, but their flexible approach to accommodation shares that same spirit of surprise and creativity. Other innovative cities and businesses—time to consider transforming a few unused spaces? (Related: Free accommodation for visiting creatives — Swiss bomb shelter becomes 'zero star' hotel.)

Website: www.pixelhotel.at
Contact: office@pixelhotel.at

Spotted by: Martina Meng and Tais Reis

We've seen several web-based initiatives aimed at engaging the politically alienated, including theyworkforyou.com's video tagging. Now, tapping into Twitter—the communication platform du jour—Tweetminster has created a 'place where real life and politics tweet'. The website and public service provides real-time updates of life in British politics.

Tweetminster lets users track their favourite MPs, read politicians' and lobbyists' speeches as they're spoken, and find out the hottest topics of political debate from various MPs' blogs. Launched late last year, Tweetminster currently has a roster of 18 MPs from all over Britain, 60% of whom are members of the Labour party. Each politician has a personal page that displays their followers and lists their most recent 140-character missives, as well as a tagcloud of the words they use most often. There's also a section for prospective parliamentary candidates, letting them introduce themselves and their campaigns to the internet community.

UnLtdWorld, an online platform for social entrepreneurs, teamed up with Thin Martian, a creative digital agency, to move the concept from brainwave to launch state in 48 hours. (UnLtdWorld and Thin Martian also collaborated on a Shoreditch tricycle race we wrote about.) Inspiration came in part after stumbling upon Tweet Congress, an American site that chronicles the twittering activities of congressmen and congresswomen. Both sites aim to make politicians and political culture more accessible, thereby encouraging greater participation in debate.

Services such as Twitter are making it easier for consumers to establish an immediate, real-time dialogue with previously distant entities. And they provide organisations with yet another opportunity to turn transparency tyranny into transparency triumph.

Website: www.tweetminster.com
Contact: @albertonardelli — @killdozer — @goldenchild128 — @misja

Spotted by: Alice Pilias

Theyworkforyou.com, the site that helps the British public keep tabs on their politicians, has just made the government's goings-on even more transparent and accessible. Its full archive of video clips of debates in the House of Commons can now be searched, thanks to a new initiative to link parliament transcripts with video footage.

The website created a timestamping application in June 2008 to match up each clip--recorded from BBC Parliament, the British equivalent of C-SPAN--to the correct transcript. Even though all of the timestamping needed to be done manually without a budget, two months after launch all 42,018 video clips were fully searchable. The non-profit site managed this by involving the general public, creating a small incentive by naming its top taggers, one of whom is responsible for over 8,000 entries. It also encouraged participation by making it incredibly easy for anyone to pitch in: all users need to do to get started is to click the 'Give me a random speech that needs timestamping' link. They're then shown a video, and just need to press the 'now' button when they hear the words displayed below the player. The Houses of Parliament are currently in their Summer Recess, but when they get back to work in October, Theyworkforyou.com will be able to match up videos and transcripts as soon as they become available.

By relying on the simple system of text search, finding important parts of debates in seemingly endless sequences of video suddenly becomes much less daunting. The project's aim is to make it easy for citizens to watch relevant footage, and to remind politicians of the promises they've made. While Google and other tech behemoths work on making video searchable, the fact that this low-tech project was completed so quickly demonstrates the power of harnessing the crowds, and how ready and willing those crowds are to help create a greater degree of transparency. Politicians, beware: there's no place to hide ;-)

Website: www.theyworkforyou.com/video
Contact: team@theyworkforyou.com

Spotted by: Simon Blair

With food prices soaring across the globe, consumers are understandably concerned. To help ensure that retailers don’t pass on more of the price increases than is strictly necessary, Italy's Department for Agriculture, Food & Forestry is offering transparency by text message. Its SMS Consumatori service tracks prices for over 80 types of fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy products, fish, etc and lets consumers access them when they’re out shopping.

To use the service, shoppers send a text message to 47947, typing the name of the product they want a price for. (The system recognizes both singular and plural nouns, as well as variations.) They instantly receive a reply listing both a wholesale price and average retail prices in the North, Centre and South. If a product has various varieties, the service sends separate messages for each of the most popular ones. For example: text "pear", and SMS Consumatori will return three separate messages, for Kaiser, Conference and Abate pears.

Taking a thorough approach to getting its prices right, SMS Consumatori sources information from 2,200 different stores, ranging from butchers, market stalls and greengrocers to 'ipermercati' and discount stores, and covers all of Italy. Prices are updated from Tuesday to Saturday. The project's website also shows price development over time, and where the highest and lowest prices for each product were found. Shoppers can even fill a virtual shopping cart and see what its average cost would be; registered users can save their shopping baskets for a personal view on historical data.

The service is free, but to keep costs and traffic down, consumers can request a maximum of 5 prices per day and 30 per month. Since it doesn't look like global food prices will drop anytime soon, this is one to set up elsewhere if you're in government or telecom/mobile. For more on how to prosper (or fail) in a fully-informed marketplace, check out trendwatching.com's briefing on transparency tyranny.

Website: www.smsconsumatori.it

Spotted by: Giulia Cuccolini

South-Korean product designer Hanyoung Lee has come up with a safety device that could make traffic lights obsolete, or at least improve their effectiveness. His so-called Virtual Wall is designed for busy city streets. Instead of showing a red light when it’s time for pedestrians to cross the street, Lee’s Wall projects a curtain-like, two-dimensional image of giant people crossing the street. The real pedestrians walk behind their virtual counterparts.

Lee’s design—which hasn’t made it off the drawing board yet—works thanks to a stack of laser projectors installed in poles on opposites sides of the street. Digital renderings of the Wall can be found on Yanko Design, and while there’s no word on an actual prototype, the device would likely cost more than traditional traffic lights. Thus, any city thinking of commissioning a Virtual Wall might consider flashing advertising messages over the heads of the virtual pedestrians in order to help offset the system’s cost. Another potential issue might be how to activate the Wall so as not to startle motorists approaching an intersection.

We generally don’t feature concepts that haven’t yet made it to market, but this one seems to present a host of business opportunities, as well as great PR potential for the first cities that implement it. Besides halting traffic at intersections, the projected images could be used to direct crowds at large events or form temporary virtual fences to warn motorists that road construction crews are working nearby. And how about smart deer crossing walls, that can both detect and project oncoming deer?

Website: www.yankodesign.com/index.php/2008/04/21/cant-cross-a-virtual-wall
Contact: hanyoungs@gmail.com

Spotted by: Harry van Praag

The internet, which has succeeded in democratizing so many other parts of life, has now set its sights on one of society’s most stalwart professions: democratic lawmakers. A recently launched Australian political party called Senator On-Line promises to let its members vote on every bill that comes before the nation’s parliament. The party’s representative then votes in accordance with the majority. Talk about direct democracy!

Anyone enraged by the power of special interest groups, back-room deal making and partisan bickering will be struck by the compelling alternative Senator On-Line presents. The party has no political agenda or platform, remains independent of lobbying groups and vows to help its members decide how to vote on issues with impartial online information detailing the pros and cons of any particular stance. Some might argue that such an extreme form of direct democracy could easily take on a dark side. What’s to prevent party members from voting against needed taxes, for example? Similarly, could they vote to strip away the rights of minority groups?

An FAQ on the party’s website attempts to answer these questions. To prevent a malevolent majority from taking over the country, Senator On-Line will only field candidates in Australia’s Senate (upper house), whose powers are limited to approving and rejecting bills. Under Australia’s parliamentary system, it’s the lower house, the House of Representatives, that proposes and debates bills.

Still, web-based democracy is an untested idea. And like all social communities or networks, Senator On-Line and its imitators will likely evolve in unexpected ways. Special interest groups might shift their efforts from lobbying legislators to reaching out directly to grass roots party members, who—for good or ill—may be more susceptible to their message. Candidates and their parties have traditionally provided a check when their rivals make false statements. With a web-based democracy, that role would likely fall more urgently on the press and on watchdog groups.

On the other hand, the gridlock that exists in many of the world’s legislative bodies remains in dire need of new thinking. And as the web continues to grow in importance, political parties are bound to rely on it more and more. No direct business opportunities connected to this concept (for now), but the model should be of interest to anyone tracking the workings of online crowds and communities. And anyone who'd like to start their online party ;-)

Website: www.senatoronline.org.au
Contact: www.senatoronline.org.au/contact

One day you pass that quaint row of shops in your neighbourhood only to discover it’s being demolished to make way for a parking lot. If only you’d known about the tear-down plans well enough in advance you could have lodged a protest. That’s where PlanningAlerts.com comes in. The UK startup functions as a targeted search engine, digitally scouring local government agencies’ online records for news of construction projects destined to affect the lives of local residents. Residents can sign up, enter a postal code and receive alerts by email. Result: if there’s a public meeting scheduled to discuss zoning changes in a nearby subdivision, users receive word of the meeting’s time and place. So far, the non-profit venture has sent out 21,686 alerts for 156 local authorities.

Of course, this information is already made public—as required by law—in a local newspaper’s official notices section. Likewise, truly determined neighbourhood advocates can find news of planning and zoning commission meetings and city council agendas posted online. However, like another service we recently profiled—Cleanscores, which posts restaurant health inspection reports online—PlanningAlerts.com unlocks the information, making it easier for people to stay informed. Especially by adding social features like comments and discussion boards that would make it easy for neighbourhood residents to coordinate action.

PlanningAlerts.com is currently in beta, covering only portions of the UK, but it doesn’t lack potential. The site’s super-local focus serves a role traditionally taken up by community newspapers and illustrates how the most mundane and obscure information can hold huge importance to those affected by it—something that publishers like Gannett are picking up on, and that many other established newspapers should take to heart.

Website: www.planningalerts.com
Contact: team@planningalerts.com

Spotted by: Susanna Haynie