The term is derived from the verb tip, meaning "to throw out of a vehicle" and on the fly, meaning "on the wing" — to throw away carelessly or casually.Too bad, because I had it figured out as "leaving garbage as tips for flies".
And how did I find out about fly-tipping? There is a website FixMyStreet, which invites you to
Report, view, or discuss local problemsAnd how, again, how did I stumble upon that whistle-blowing (or else tattletale) site? Glad you asked.
(like graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting)
It was mentioned in a weekly Community Update for the OpenStreetMap project. And if you don't know about, or participate in, the OpenStreetMap phenomenon, then you are seriously missing out on the major crowdsourced, worldwide, volunteer cartography movement of our times.
While the UK-only FixMyStreet uses some klutzy map watermarked "Ministry of JUSTICE", the announcement deals more specifically with the newly inaugurated Norwegian version called, naturally, FiksGataMi. And that one uses the beautifully rendered OpenStreetMap.
The idea behind both FixMyStreet and OpenStreetMap is exactly the same: directing the energy of civic-minded individuals towards improve the surrounding world for everyone. OpenStreetMap does it virtually, by letting anyone detail or correct the map of the area they live in or are well familiar with. FixMyStreet aims to do it quite literally: by allowing citizens to drop little local "bug reports" onto the map, which are immediately routed to the appropriate municipal authorities.
Here's a representative list of what bugs the Brits who visited the site in the last few hours:
In all, over 100,000 problems have been reported in the UK since the site launched three years ago. 3,171 of them were fixed in the past 30 days.
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