Polka Dot Sky Software made citizen experience software for local governments: alerts that tell residents what is happening on their own block, and the tools public works teams use to send them. In December 2022 it merged into KZN Consulting, Inc., which does business as Kaizen. Its products are now Kaizen products, and polkadotskysoftware.com and pdspsoftware.com lead to this page.
Unified Alerts and MyDPW are now service alerts
Polka Dot Sky sold Unified Alerts: one alerting service for residents and operations staff, matched to an address, a service route or a license plate. Its public works edition, MyDPW, has run for the District of Columbia Department of Public Works since 2017.
At Kaizen it is service alerts. Street sweeping, trash and recycling, leaf collection and snow, each sent by text, email or push notification to the residents whose block it affects. It is multi-tenant, so a new department gets its own branding, schedules and message templates without a separate build, and we host and maintain it.
Residents answer a text, not a web form
During the pandemic, Polka Dot Sky packaged its alerting into ready-to-launch campaigns: automated senior wellness checks, quarantine monitoring, test result delivery, employee contact tracing and opt-in alerts for residents. Each one shipped with hosting, branding, content and support included.
Kaizen's pandemic work for Maryland and Delaware ran on the same principle, at state scale: contact tracing, vaccination scheduling and community testing, with 45 million messages over three years as prime contractor. Read how it was built in the case study.
Where to find it now
- Service alerts and MyDPW: service alerts
- The pandemic response: Maryland and Delaware
- Public works data integration: ten years in production
- Everything we build and run: products
The Polka Dot Sky job postings are closed.