What I'm building, what I'm learning, and why civic tech matters.
My wife took a blurry photo of a pothole from a moving car. The AI couldn't read it. That failure led to a voice-first reporting tool that works at a red light in 10 seconds.
SolveTO went from 185 indexable pages to 1,300+ by generating ward-level, issue-level, and councillor-level pages from existing data. Here's the strategy.
46 reports across 20 wards, five media interviews, a flood of feedback from Torontonians on Twitter, and new features: reference numbers, duplicate detection, face redaction, and a homelessness category.
I tried using Claude's API for face detection. Three times. It kept pixelating the sidewalk. Here's why some LLMs fail at spatial tasks and what I used instead.
Track your civic report anytime with a unique SolveTO reference number. No account needed.
When someone reports a person sleeping rough on a sidewalk, they're asking for help, not publishing a mugshot. How I built face redaction and a homelessness issue type into SolveTO.
I tested every major Canadian city's 311 API. The result: zero let you submit a report programmatically.
SolveTo was featured on CBC Metro Morning, Global News, Toronto Today, Now Toronto, and the Ben Mulroney Show in a single week.
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