FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
TBILISI March 21, 2011.
Chemikucha.ge, a new website developed by Transparency International Georgia, allows residents of Tbilisi to easily report and discuss problems on the city’s streets, in order to get them fixed.
“If you see a broken water pipe that is leaking, a dangerous hole in the sidewalk that needs to be covered, vandalism or some other problem on a street that you are concerned about, you can now easily report it”, says Eka Gigauri, TI Georgia’s Executive Director. “It only takes a few seconds to file a report to the website and locate a problem on our online map, but doing this can make a huge difference. Whenever a problem is reported to the website, Tbilisi City Hall will automatically receive an email that informs them about the issue.”

On chemikucha.ge, users can upload pictures of a problem, submit updates when something has been fixed, find out which problems have been reported by other users, and which ones have been resolved.

“Officials from Tbilisi City Hall have been very open to this innovative concept. City Hall will monitor incoming reports and act on them, so that together we can make Tbilisi an even more beautiful, safe and well?functioning city”, Gigauri says.

The open-source FixMyStreet concept, on which Chemikucha.ge is based, has been very successful in the United Kingdom, Canada, Norway and several other countries, where similar websites helped to get thousands of problems fixed. Chemikucha.ge is the first such platform to be launched in a country of the former Soviet Union.

In a poll conducted by CRRC for the National Democratic Institute last year, 38 percent of Georgians said that roads are the most important local issue for them. Respondents also named sewage (ten percent), streetlights (nine percent) and trash collection (eight percent) as local issues that are very important to them. Chemikucha.ge will help to resolve problems in all these areas.

FixMyStreet Georgia – Chemikucha.ge has been made possible by generous support from Eurasia Partnership Foundation.

Media contact:
Nana Lobjanidze, Communications Officer
Transparency International Georgia
Email: nana@transparency.ge [1]
Mobile: +995 (8)99 21 03 09

For regular updates on current issues related to transparency and good governance in Georgia, check TI Georgia’s new blog: http://transparency.ge/en/blog [2] and talk with us through
http://twitter.com/TIGeorgiaEng [3]