What is Kankaan Palvelu?
Kangas is a smart, new, green hybrid district being developed right next to Jyväskylä town centre. Kankaan Palvelu (KP) provide services for the people living, working, and owning property in the area. Funding for these services comes from either selling shares in the housing coop or service charges paid directly by the shareholders. Kangas combines sustainable urban accommodation with the latest in housing technology and digital services. Social well-being and community are its core values.
YOU CAN’T ALWAYS GET WHAT YOU WANT
KP and our rock band started working together when KP discovered that their resident portal (kangasverkko.fi) which had been built by another contractor, was not all that they’d hoped it would be. The aim had been to develop an easy-to-use service that KP could themselves easily modify, so they could offer the people in Kangas the services they really need – whether they lived there, worked there or owned property there. Once the service was up and running though, it turned out to be fancy venue that nobody had the keys to… There was no way of independently creating or altering anything without the service-builder being called in again.
“It might be that we rushed into service development a bit too quickly”, admits KP’s service manager Ulla-Maija Valtonen. “Once we noticed the service was not what we were looking for, we decided to start again. We asked for quotes from others too, but RockOn was the only one to pick up on our problem quickly and take up the challenge.”
I GET UP AND NOTHIN’ GETS ME DOWN
You can’t improve a bad album just by adding a couple of extra tracks, so it was decided that the service needed to be built again completely from scratch. The band rebuilt the portal using different technologies, so there was also an appropriate content management tool which would let the customer be able to independently keep developing the service further. Now KP can edit and control the system by themselves.
Since our band members paid the Kangasverkko ‘venue’ a visit, it has become a popular club, and the KP admins finally have the ‘Access All Areas’ passes they deserve. It means, for example, that they can communicate with service users over more than one channel, communicate information directly about the buildings and many pieces of art in the area, and there is also a channel where people can book to share car use. In the future, the service will also be developed to provide information about, for instance, recycling facilities too.
“The lack of resources – both time and money – and the various requirements of all the different user-groups have made this project really quite challenging. But RockOn was always up to the task and were able to do the things we really wanted”.
Ulla-Maija Valtonen, service manager, Kankaan Palvelu Oy
