A city speaks every day. The challenge is hearing all of it.
Every day, residents tell their local authority what works, what gets in the way and what is changing around them. This information already exists. It simply arrives everywhere at once: in an inbox, over the phone, at the front desk, under a social media post or in a message to an elected official.
We created CityMood to bring together what local authorities already receive and make it easy to understand. No new channel to set up. No habits to change.
The problem was not a lack of information. It was how scattered it was.
One resident sends an email. Another calls. A third writes to an elected official. A fourth fills in the council's form. Sometimes all four are talking about the same pavement, the same noise or the same broken traffic light. But their messages arrive in four different places, and nobody has the full picture.
Spending time with staff, managers and elected officials made one thing clear: every individual request also tells us something about the wider community. A neighbourhood where a problem keeps coming back. A facility generating more and more requests. An issue building before it becomes visible. A recurring misunderstanding.
That information was not lost. It was simply scattered.
Connect to what already exists, rather than asking everyone to change.
Our first question was not “How do we build another tool for local authorities?” but “How can we make use of what already arrives every day?”
The answer came down to one principle: keep everything in place. Residents continue to write, call, visit the front desk or comment on social media. Teams keep their channels and tools. CityMood works behind the scenes: centralising, linking messages about the same issue, categorising, tracking and making the whole picture clear.
The product takes shape in local authority offices, as well as our own.
Much of our work involves listening to the people who keep a local authority running every day: reception staff, department heads, chief executives, elected officials and their teams, in cities of very different sizes. These conversations determine what we build next, and what we leave out.
Three co-founders, all engineers, and a lot of time in the field.
Our background is in technology. We learned the rest by listening.
Three rules we follow.
Every feature starts with a situation observed in a department, rather than an idea in a meeting.
A tool that forces a local authority to reorganise around it is unlikely to be useful. CityMood adapts to what is already there.
What happens behind the scenes can be sophisticated. What appears on screen should make sense in seconds.
Helping a local authority understand what its community is telling it, on any given morning.
Not an annual report. Not a hunch. A clear picture when decisions are made: what keeps coming up, where, since when, and what still needs a response.
Residents have always talked about their city. Our job is to make sure their messages are received in full and put to use.
