The Internet provides powerful capabilities for individuals to gain visibility and control over their environment.  A good example of this is HeyGov! for San Francisco, – a cloud services solution that the City of San Francisco just adopted to give their citizens a faster and easier way to submit service requests regarding potholes, graffiti, and street cleaning to the City’s 311 Department. The HeyGov! Service also provides an interactive mapping application for citizens to monitor and analyze their non-emergency 311 service requests.

Built on the Windows Azure platform, HeyGov! is a SaaS offering from partner, ISC, that takes advantage of  the scalable storage and processing power of the cloud and provides the ability to quickly address service requests and implement updates even during peak times. The City of Miami, the first adopter of HeyGov!, has already starting using the solution in other departments including Public Safety for reporting code enforcement violations.  Read more about the City of Miami’s solution in the blog post, “Real World Windows Azure: Interview with James Osteen, Assistant Director of Information Technology for the City of Miami”.

You can read more about the solution and how it works for San Francisco in the blog post, “A New Bright Star in Government – HeyGov! for San Francisco”, which was posted to the Bright Side of Government blog yesterday. The official press release can be found here.