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• Jeremy, a long-delayed (in Watchdog.sk: Responsiveness of Local Government in Bratislava using New Media Tools)
  

  Jeremy,

  a long-delayed response from me now :) I am sorry for that but as all of us are, I have been very busy lately. Just quick update on our project - we are in the process of finalizing databases and hopefully will be able to launch pilot testing in January.

  You are right that we can hardly prevent "crazy" people to submit their alerts under different names. As mentioned in the Prague during our video call to UK it has happened to them as well but the number of such cases was not very high, in fact very marginal. I like the idea of rating of users as we expect to have some people submitting many alerts and it would also be motivating for them to do a "good job". Other than that we might introduce registration of users which however does not help user-friendlines and requires too many clicks on the way to submit alert. To conclude, we are aware of this issue and I believe that will be able to deal with it in the pilot testing phase.

  Regarding MPs - I meant members of local parliaments or local bodies (assemblies). Local governments in Slovakia work on the following principles: mayor, his/her office, local parliaments with committees. Members of local parliaments are usually members of committees where non-members also participate. If the alert is on e.g. falling roof, members of committee responsible for constructions will receive this alert (including Local MPs). However those Local MPs who wish to receive all alerts or just alerts in specific areas in order to be informed can click on "agree to receive all alerts" and will get every single one.

  I hope I´ve made it more clear.

  Ctibor

• there is plan B (in Watchdog.sk: Responsiveness of Local Government in Bratislava using New Media Tools)
  

  Dear Rita,

  thanks for your comment. We have a slide "Procedural Model" where we have mentioned that new request will be submitted to official as well as to mayor. Thus we will inform the real boss. We intent, as mentioned on other slides, to make a ranking of local governments. We will publish a report stating what were the cases in each municipality. We believe that mayors will not like to be listed in the report and/or to see their government among the worst responsive ones.

  I think that your comment is very useful as it questions our strategy and planned procedures. We believe that two letters to local officials are just enough. The third or fourth will not make them to answer. We might think of making list of least  responsive officials with ratio between  number of complaints from citizens and their effort to solve it.

  Just to conclude, Bratislava is the pilot testing, thus can bring up many changes to our strategy and can change our way of thinking about the website.