Civic Issue Reporter: A Web-Based Platform for Civic Complaint Management and Transparent Public Service Delivery

Many local civic problems, such as road damage, water-supply disruptions, waste accumulation, and street-light failures, require an organized process for reporting and resolution. This paper presents Civic Issue Reporter, a web-based application designed to manage civic complaints through separate citizen, department, and administrator workflows. Citizens can register, submit issues with optional images and location details, and track their reports. Department users can view issues associated with their service categories and update their status, while administrators oversee reported issues and department accounts. The application is implemented using Node.js, Express, EJS, and MongoDB through Mongoose. It also includes optional AI-assisted issue screening through the Gemini API, escalation-related fields, resolution-image handling, and email notification utilities. The system design incorporates issue data models, role-specific workflows, and mechanisms for managing complaint progress. The implementation was examined through static source-code inspection; the application was not independently executed for this manuscript. Therefore, no measured performance, user-study outcomes, or completed test results are reported. The prototype requires further functional testing, security assessment, and input-validation improvements before deployment.