What I'm building, what I'm learning, and why civic tech matters.
Fourteen days of shipping, talking, and showing up everywhere at once. What it produced, and what I learned about volume.
The part of a 311 report nobody outside city hall ever got to see, and what changes when the answer comes back to you instead of waiting to be asked for.
Contractors bid on guesswork and BIAs depute without numbers. What changes when the condition of a street stops being a guess.
Eight minutes on Newstalk 1010 with John Tory, who ran Toronto for nine years and named the missing piece in one sentence. What the platform does, and a correction I owe him.
The paper trail behind closing the loop, from the 2011 city audit that first named the problem to a Yonge Street pothole that closed in eight days. Every date and quote links to the city's own record or the original story.
This is not built against a city's current system, it works with it. What a city hall gets: more reports than it could ever collect on its own, each one geolocated, photographed, and complete, and an honest adoption path that starts with an inbox.
A storefront's door opens onto ground a business doesn't own but depends on every day. What a BIA manager or facilities operator gets from a public civic reporting layer, and why it works the same way a resident's does.
Seven cities run on Solve Canada now. What that means for a resident is simpler than the sentence sounds: one account, everywhere, and you never relearn how to be heard.
Singapore built one app for a country of cities. Canada built one app per city, by accumulation, not by choice. The layer that connects them is already running in six of ours.
Kitchener and Waterloo went live in one afternoon. Ottawa took forty minutes. Not because the work got smaller, but because the platform was finally built the right shape.
Get occasional updates on what we're building and how Toronto is improving.
Or read the open letter from the founder.
Get the SolveTO app
Quick access from your home screen