Nik Rajkovic / news@whmi.com

Livingston County’s Information Technology Department is being recognized for it's new Pet Reunification application to report a lost or found animal.

It earned the "Citizen Impact Project of the Year" award from Mi-GIMIS -- the state chapter of a professional IT association of worldwide government IT leaders.

"The award comes from a group only public sector folks are involved in. We also won the 'People's Choice' award from the CMPASS, which is is a GIS organization," said Diane Gregor, the county's applications manager.

"It's just pride, actually. There's no monetary thing. We got a little trophy, which we're using out front to show everyone we have this award."

Livingston County residents can use the Pet Reunification application to drop a pin on a map indicating the location, and provide contact information either for the animal shelter to view privately or to be displayed on the web.

"The software we had been using since 2015 had a mechanism for the public to report lost or found animals, but it was pretty rudimentary and didn't really force organization of the data that was coming in. And it obviously did not have a mapping component, which is really helpful in a situation where you've lost of found a pet, because then you can visually see, well, I found a pet, someone lost one in the area. So, it's very nice to have that ability to have it mapped," said Gregor.

"We thought that since the new application didn't have the ability to report lost or found animals, if we built something that was map-based, that would be much more useful for the public than what we had in the past."

Gregor says the application already helped reunite a pet dog with its owner in just the first two weeks of its launching.

In its award description, Mi-GIS wrote:

"Each point can be clicked on to display information about that reported animal, along with contact information (direct or Animal Shelter). There is also a list of those animals, and clicking on one in the list will zoom to that reported animal and display the information. Custom pop-up scripts written in Arcade are used to dynamically display contact information as well as some basic animal characteristics provided by the user reporting the animal. The Survey123 form can be used by itself on mobile or desktop; the option to use the Survey123 form within the desktop version of the web mapping application is available as well."

More information is linked below.