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Benjamin Platner Berkowitz (born March 6, 1979) is an American entrepreneur, activist, and web 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.”

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
Berkowitz was born in 1979 in New Haven, Connecticut, to the late Jeremy I. Berkowitz, a general contractor, and Jody Platner, a day-care manager. He attended Foote School and graduated from Hopkins School in 1997. He earned a BA degree in electronic media from The George Washington University in 2001.

Career
While in college, Berkowitz worked as a disk jockey and record-label representative in Washington, D.C. After graduation, he returned to New Haven and worked as a web and graphics designer and a construction manager. Wishing to involve himself in civic life, he became leader of a merchants’ association that removed graffiti, planted trees and opened a farmers' market.

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.

SeeClickFix startup
As part of his civic-improvement efforts in New Haven, Berkowitz began asking local officials for infrastructure repairs, tree trimming and other public services. He was frustrated by the difficulty of communicating with government employees and a lack of a mechanism for followup. He conceived a civic engagement website where citizens could pinpoint issues like broken streetlights and potholes on a map and forward the repair requests to local officials. The problems could be publicly documented and their progress toward repairs tracked through a geographic information system. In the spring of 2008, Berkowitz launched SeeClickFix with partners Miles Lasater, Kam Lasater and Jeff Blasius.

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. This technology made it simple for online media outlets to plug in SeeClickFix as a reader service. 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 enabled further acceptance, allowing SeeClickFix users to document and share repair requests on the fly.

Investors in SeeClickFix include O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Omidyar Network. The startup company had 18 employees in 2013 and grew to 36 by 2016.

The SeeClickFix client base spread to local governments, as municipalities began using the service to compile citizen requests and manage repair projects. 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.

Books that include sections on Berkowitz and SeeClickFix include The Foundation for an Open Source City by Jason Hibbets and ''Disrupt! Think Epic. Be Epic.: 25 Successful Habits for an Extremely Disruptive World'' by Bill Jensen.

Personal life
Berkowitz proposed to Kathleen Fredlund while the two were creating a public-art mural at a highway overpass. They were married on August 26, 2012. They live in New Haven and have two small children.