What I'm building, what I'm learning, and why civic tech matters.
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.
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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Or read the open letter from the founder.
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