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Benjamin Platner Berkowitz (born March 6, 1979) is an American entrepreneur, activist, and designer. Since 2008, he has been CEO and co-founder of the civic technology company SeeClickFix.

The Huffington Post named Berkowitz "Greatest Person of the Day" on December 2, 2010, saying he is “revolutionizing the way we report problems of infrastructure in our hometowns.”

In 2013, PBS named Berkowitz one of 10 "Young Agents of Change."

Berkowitz spoke at the White House on July 3, 2012 at the invitation of its Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation. In a forum on Citizen-Based Innovation, he discussed civic technology and the crowdsourcing of government functions.

Early life and education[edit source]

Berkowitz was born in 1979 in New Haven, Connecticut, the first child of Jeremy I. Berkowitz (1948-2012), a general contractor, and Jody Platner, a day-care manager. The family observed a blend of religious traditions as the father was Jewish and mother a Quaker.

Younger brother John Berkowitz (born 1982) http://www.siliconhillsnews.com/2017/06/14/john-berkowitz-yodle-and-ojo-labs-co-founder-discusses-building-companies-on-ideas-to-invoices/ is CEO and Co-Founder of OJO Labs, which develops artificial intelligence software. Sister Brianna (born 1985) is a teacher.

Berkowitz's maternal grandfather Warren Platner (1919-2006) was an architect and designer known for the interior of the Ford Foundation Building in New York City and an enduring collection of Modernist furniture. https://www.pinterest.com/materiallife/warren-platner/

Berkowitz attended Foote School and graduated from the Hopkins School in 1997. In athletics, his wiry, compact physique enabled feats of skateboarding that silenced schoolyard bullies. Classmates recall that his nerdy lack of underarm deodorant didn’t deter female admirers.

While attending The George Washington University, Berkowitz worked as a part-time disk jockey and record-label representative for Universal Music Group. In 2001, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in electronic media.

Career[edit source] After graduation, Berkowitz bought a home in New Haven's Upper State Street district. He worked as a construction manager and graphic designer, creating and selling t-shirts bearing slogans he'd written, such as “New Haven: It’s Better Than Your Town” and "Marriage: It's so Gay." He became leader of a merchants’ association that removed graffiti, planted trees and opened a farmers' market. Berkowitz thrived on community involvement. His experiences working for his father's Red Rooster construction company and the aesthetic influence of grandfather Warren Platner shaped his activism toward improving the built environment and infrastructure.

When the city was slow to respond to a neighborhood request for a crosswalk at a busy intersection, a graffiti-style crosswalk by an unknown tagger appeared overnight. The public attention created by that guerilla tactic hastened the city's response to install a real crosswalk -- an outcome that wan't lost on Berkowitz.

In 2012, Berkowitz organized the Inside Out Project, a public art installation meant to unify two neighborhoods separated by an interstate-highway overpass. To encourage social interactions, residents posed for portrait photographs that were enlarged and pasted on the concrete walls. The project was inspired by works of the French artist JR.

Berkowitz is a co-founder and board of directors president of Make Haven, a not-for-profit community tool shop and gathering place for Maker culture. He has served on the boards of the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven and the New Haven Land Trust. He has been involved with Code for America and National Day of Civic Hacking. He also organized Snow Crew, a web platform that matched snow-shoveling volunteers with disabled and other citizens needing assistance. https://twitter.com/snowcreworg?lang=en

SeeClickFix startup[edit source]

The beginning of SeeClickFix dates to to around 2005? when Berkowitz was hired to create a web site for the New Haven Land Trust. He tinkered with the emerging technology of Internet mapping to display locations of the organization's community gardens. Meanwhile, his frustration grew with the inefficient process of telephoning or writing government employees for infrastructure repairs and the lack of an effective follow-up mechanism.

Ben: What about this claim from Inc? At about that time, in the fall of 2007, a friend of his, Miles Lasater, came across a British website, FixMyStreet, on which residents could report problems such as potholes and broken streetlights to regional councils. Berkowitz and Lasater liked the idea. But Berkowitz, envisioned a more ambitious platform that would also allow users to collaborate to resolve issues themselves.

Berkowitz conceived a civic engagement website where citizens could pinpoint issues like broken streetlights and potholes with a geographic information system. It would automatically forward the repair requests to local officials. The problems would be publicly documented and the progress of repairs tracked on the website.

Local residents Miles and Kam Lasater became Berkowtiz's collaborators and investors. The brothers were founders of Higher One, a fast-growing financial services startup hatched in a Yale dorm room. Brainstorming over a Sunday meal at Miles Lasater's house, they created a blog and Twitter account to promote the idea. With Kam Lasater's engineering skill they were able to build the original SeeClickFix application quickly, in what Miles Lasater called a mini startup weekend. The module that automatically notifies governments of the citizen complaints took more time. Programmer Jeff Balsius came aboard as a partner for this task. In the early years, the code was completely several times in different programming languages (which ones??).

The SeeClickFix proof-of-concept won a $20,000 prize at a social enterprise conference in Miami. The money allowed Berkowitz to quit his day jobs and concentrate on SeeClickFix. He labored in a succession of borrowed spaces, cheap offices and coffee shops with help from the quasi-public New Haven Economic Development Corporation. In the spring of 2008, the partners launched SeeClickFix.

Berkowitz and his collaborators were among the earliest programmers to use the Google Maps API (application programming interface) to create a third-party software as a service (SaaS) product. The cloud-based technology made it simple for online media outlets to plug in SeeClickFix as a reader service feature.[13] The first paying customers included New York Times, and newspapers in New Haven, Philadelphia and Oakland. [PBS Newshour Link 4]

SeeClickFix was well suited for a new wave of hyperlocal media, which sought to engage readers with quality-of-life coverage and online forums. Smartphones and social media brought further acceptance, enabling SeeClickFix users to document and share repair requests on the fly.

Early investors in SeeClickFix included O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Omidyar Network. The startup company had 18 employees in 2013. A later round of investment involved Elm Street Ventures https://www.elmvc.com/ and quasi-public Connecticut Innovations http://ctinnovations.com/

The SeeClickFix clientele spread to local governments, as municipalities began using the service to compile citizen requests and schedule repair projects. The service expanded to include back-end modules to help governments "receive, manage, and respond to citizen complaints" [].By 2016 its staff had grown to 36. According to the SeeClickFix website, its service covers more than 25,000 municipalities and 8,000 neighborhoods in the United States and internationally. By October 2016, it surpassed three million cases reported.

Berkowitz always intended SeeClickFix to be a disruptive technology for the 3-1-1 system and other dated reporting systems. However, he has emphasized that better communication between citizens and governments can build trust throughout a community -- an antidote to the mistrust bred by damaged infrastructure, slow repairs and poor communication. He believes that collaboration among government managers, citizens and police improve a community's well-being. One study went so far as to say that SeeClickFix had lowered a city's crime rate. [Is there a link for this??]

Similarly, Berkowitz has cultivated a corporate culture at SeeClickFix that emphasizes collaboration and trust among employees. The company offers profit sharing and a variety of traditional and non-traditional fringe benefits.

Personal life[edit source] While on vacation in Playa del Carmen, Mexico in 2009??, Berkowitz met Kathleen Fredlund, a college student from Vancouver. After several-year relationship, he proposed to her while they were creating a public-art mural at a highway overpass in New Haven. They were married on August 26, 2012. They live in New Haven and have two small children.