A streetlight out at the end of the road. A pothole getting worse. A bin nobody has emptied in a week.
For the resident who notices, the next step is always the same small obstacle: who do I tell, and how? The switchboard, which answers during office hours. The front desk, which means giving up half a morning. A comment under a post on the official page, hoping somebody reads it. An email to the generic address, with no way of knowing whether it’s the right one.
Most people end up taking the shortest route they know. The result is that reports reach the council from many directions and in wildly different shapes: some written down, some passed on by word of mouth; some with a precise address, some with “near the park”; some complete, some that have to be reconstructed over a phone call.
Then there’s the part residents feel most. Once you’ve reported something, silence usually follows. Not because nothing is happening — the work often gets scheduled and done — but because there’s no thread connecting the person who reported it to the person handling it. And someone who never hears back either reports it again next time, or stops reporting altogether.
MINOMO Report is the feature that holds that thread, from submission through to closure. As of today it’s no longer a plan: it’s live, and it switches on municipality by municipality.
The first pilot is up and running in a real municipality. We’re following those first genuine reports alongside the people receiving them, and once the picture is complete we’ll give it an article of its own — what worked, and what had to be fixed.
But the part that really changes the maths, for an administration, isn’t what it does. It’s what the council doesn’t have to do to have it.
Why you don’t need a council app of your own
A council’s own application takes a serious development budget, and then it has to be maintained, updated, kept accessible and kept compliant for years. But the hardest part comes afterwards, and no budget solves it: somebody has to install it. An app you need three times a year rarely clears that bar, and a channel nobody has on their phone isn’t a channel.
On MINOMO the audience is already there. Residents have the app for local events, for the loyalty cards of the shops they walk into, for the businesses they follow. Reporting isn’t the reason they install the app: it’s a feature they find inside an app they use for something else.
That’s the difference between building a channel and using one that exists — and it’s why, for an administration, the natural comparison isn’t with another software supplier.
Thirty seconds on one side, a complete case on the other
For the resident, reporting is guided and asks for very little, all of it useful: the category of the problem, the point on the map, a short description and a severity level. No form to fill in, no opening hours to work around, no number to look up.
From that moment they follow progress in the app and get an alert at every change of status. They know their report arrived, they know when it’s picked up, and they know how it ends — including when it ends in a no, because a report can be closed without being solved, accompanied by a reason that stays attached to the case and that they can see.
It also has an immediate practical effect on the office: the second phone call — the one asking whether it arrived — never gets made.
On the office side, what turns up is a case you can work on straight away: a unique reference generated automatically in the authority’s own format, position on the map, category, severity, description. No reconstructing over the phone which junction is being talked about. And cases sitting still beyond a set number of days get flagged, so they don’t drift to the bottom of the list just because they’re old.
Then there’s the same pothole reported by fifteen different people within days, which is entirely normal: each of the fifteen is seeing it for the first time. If somebody has already reported the same problem nearby, the next person isn’t offered a blank new report — they’re offered the chance to confirm the one that already exists. The office doesn’t find the same case fifteen times over to read and close one by one. It finds one, with fifteen confirmations. Which, as well as being far less work, is a good priority signal — not how serious the writer says it is, but how many people consider it a problem.
Whoever reports stays pseudonymous to the council
The office sees the report, not the name of the person who filed it.
This isn’t an ideological choice, it’s a participation one. In a town of eight thousand, reporting that somebody has dumped a pile of garden waste on a public road is something plenty of people would rather not do, because everyone knows everyone. Removing the name doesn’t reduce accountability — the feature is restricted to verified accounts — but it lowers the threshold beyond which a person decides it isn’t worth the bother.
For the administration, the result is a truer picture of what actually needs fixing.
Noise is the real risk, and it has to be kept out from the start
It’s worth saying openly, because it’s the legitimate worry of anyone assessing a tool like this: a channel that fills up with vague complaints and duplicates stops being opened by the very office meant to read it. And at that point it’s no use to anybody.
That’s why the feature ships with filters: verified accounts, daily limits per user, a geographic proximity constraint — you report where you are, not from the other side of the region — and automatic content screening.
The goal isn’t to receive the highest possible number of reports. It’s to receive the ones you can act on.
What the office doesn’t have to do
- No software to install on the authority’s computers.
- No integration to develop with existing systems.
- No data to migrate.
- No IT project to launch, and therefore no tender document to write.
The administration works from a dedicated web panel, with personal logins and traceable actions. You name the person responsible, switch on the modules you want, and begin.
Compliance is inherited from the channel
An authority that builds its own digital channel takes on a set of obligations that stay with it over time: accessibility, data protection, transparency about the use of artificial intelligence, maintenance. Using MINOMO as the channel, those obligations are already discharged upstream for the channel itself.
- Accessibility — interface designed to the relevant European standards.
- Data protection — minimised processing by design, data hosted in the European Union, a public list of the suppliers involved.
- AI transparency — wherever automated functions are involved, it’s declared.
- No advertising trackers and no profiling of residents: for a public body that isn’t a detail, it’s a condition.
What changes, in practice
| For the resident | For the office |
|---|---|
| One place to report, at any hour | One inbound flow instead of many separate routes |
| Thirty seconds, no forms | Location, category and severity there from the start |
| Knows it arrived, and when it’s picked up | The chase-up phone call never gets made |
| Confirms a report that’s already open | One case with fifteen confirmations instead of fifteen cases |
| No extra app to install | No IT project to launch |
How to switch it on
Activation is per municipality and requires no technical work from the authority: no development project, no software to buy, no training to budget for.
For a proposal covering your area, your local City Agent is the point of contact, or write to [email protected].
How it works in detail — the categories, the case statuses, the confidentiality guarantees — is all on the dedicated page: discover MINOMO Report. If you’re weighing up MINOMO for your municipality as a whole, start from MINOMO for Municipalities.