There is a growing and widespread attention currently being accorded to citizen participation in municipal governance. The citizen’s role is being seen as more active than merely abiding by the laws of the land, and strongly encouraged as part of the pursuit of the “common or public good”. Within this context, citizens can act as partners in efforts to improve the performance of municipal service provisioning by local authorities. Acting as involved “customers”, citizens can assess the services provided after having received them and as “evaluators” of services if they are trained as service quality raters to directly assess the performance of municipal services. To obtain the input needed from citizens, local authorities could conduct community surveys in the form of survey questionnaires covering various issues of concern. Such surveys could provide important insights into citizen preferences having regard to their perceptions, expectations and personal experiences with local authorities apart from enabling the development of an objective measure of a community’s level of satisfaction. These surveys could also provide a complementary insight into the official statistics and indicators from a citizen’s perspective. This paper traces the rationale for conducting community surveys in line with emerging trends for good governance within the public sector, centring on the citizen’s role as “service quality evaluators” for municipal services and exploring the effectiveness of a community survey if conducted online.