Common Good, a 311 service portal built for small governments

Common Good is our own product: a 311 service-request portal made for the governments that the big 311 platforms price out. A pothole, a broken streetlight, an overflowing bin, a downed sign: residents need one obvious place to report it, and small agencies need to keep up without buying enterprise software or a system they cannot maintain.

The problem we built it for

Enterprise 311 platforms are built and priced for large cities. In a township or small borough, non-emergency requests usually arrive by phone, email, and Facebook, then get lost. Residents do not know if anyone heard them, and staff have no single queue to work from or any record to report against.

How Common Good works

Common Good is a focused, accessible service-request system:

• A simple public intake that takes a report in a minute, on any phone, with a location and a photo
• Status tracking, so residents can see that a request was received and resolved
• A staff dashboard that routes, prioritizes, and closes requests in one place
• Exportable records, so a small agency can report on response times and volume

It is built on the same foundation as our client work: Laravel and Vue, conformant to WCAG 2.2 Level AA, written in plain language, and designed to be operated by non-technical staff. The data is yours and exportable, with no lock-in by design.

What a resident sees

The public side is deliberately small. A resident lands on one page, picks what kind of issue they are reporting, drops a pin or shares a location, adds a photo if they have one, and leaves a way to be reached if they want an update. There is no account to create and no app to download. The whole flow is built to be completed on an older phone, over a weak connection, by someone who has never used the site before. Every step is operable by keyboard and announced correctly to a screen reader, because a service that the public is told to use has to work for all of the public.

After a report is filed, the resident gets a reference they can check. Instead of wondering whether anyone saw the pothole they reported, they can see that it was received, that it is being worked, and that it was closed. That single piece of feedback is the difference between a service residents trust and one they give up on.

What staff get

On the other side is a single queue. Requests that used to arrive by phone, email, and social media land in one place, where staff can sort them, assign them, add internal notes, and close them out. Nothing depends on one person remembering a message. When a council member or a resident asks how long requests are taking, the answer is a report, not a guess, because every request carries its own history and the records export cleanly to a spreadsheet.

Because most of the people running it are not technical, the dashboard is built to be learned in an afternoon. There are no hidden settings that break the system and no workflow that assumes a full-time administrator. It is meant to be run by the same small staff that already does ten other jobs.

Why we built our own

We kept meeting small governments that wanted a real way to handle service requests and could not justify enterprise 311 pricing or the staff it assumes. The honest options were a spreadsheet, a shared inbox, or nothing. So we built the thing we kept wishing we could hand them: small enough to afford, accessible enough to meet the standard public services are held to, and simple enough to operate without a vendor on call.

Status

Common Good is in production. It is built for small-government budgets and small staff, and it is the kind of durable, accessible civic infrastructure we exist to make. To see a demonstration or talk about a pilot, get in touch.