What I'm building, what I'm learning, and why civic tech matters.
311 doesn't know if your bus route is cancelled. TTC doesn't know if your stop bench is broken. You're supposed to check two apps and figure it out yourself. We connected them.
The UN E-Government Development Index ranks 193 countries on how well they use digital technology to serve citizens. Canada is #47. Denmark is #1. The distance between them is not money or talent. It is a choice.
Toronto's council voting records are public — sitting on open data, buried in PDFs written for procedure, not for people. SolveTO makes them readable.
A one-character bug caused 55 silent failures in two days. Solid Queue's recurring.yml passes args as a positional hash, but Ruby 3.3 won't auto-convert that to keyword arguments. Here's the fix and what it taught me about monitoring.
Toronto has been collecting infrastructure data for decades. Catch basins, hydrants, traffic signals, sewer networks. All public. All free. None of it was connected. Until now.
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.
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.
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