Signalen is open-source software that municipalities use to receive and handle reports about public space, such as waste, greenery, paving or street lighting. Residents describe a report with text and photos and pin its location. The system categorises reports automatically and routes them to the right department, where staff track progress on a dashboard and can give feedback to the reporter. Signalen consists of a backend and a web frontend and is installed on Kubernetes using Helm charts.
The City of Amsterdam began developing Signalen in 2018 and, according to a European Commission case study, still leads the development and maintenance team. Participating municipalities jointly set the direction, and VNG Realisatie acts as administrative host. The licence is MPL-2.0. Municipalities can run the software themselves, which keeps data on their own infrastructure, or choose a SaaS offering from a market party. According to the same case study, the reference setup uses PostgreSQL and storage from Microsoft Azure; the hosting location is the choice of the adopting organisation.