Most of what I build starts with something I cannot let go of. For SolveTO, it was a pothole.
For about eight months I drove past the same one near my house. Every day. And I kept thinking the city does not know this is here. Not because anyone there stopped caring, but because nobody ever told them in a way they could act on. So I tried the proper way: the phone line, then the form. Twelve minutes, five pages, confusing dropdowns. I submitted it and got a reference number, and then the only way to learn anything was to go check that number myself, over and over, while nothing came back. That is the moment most people quit. The cost of caring had gotten higher than the value of caring.
That gap is the whole problem, and it is not a Toronto problem. Nearly every city runs some version of the same form, built the way someone believed a form should be built, without ever asking what the person filling it out needs to do it once and come back again.
The data was always there
This is bigger than any one app. The city has been collecting this data for decades, over a million pieces of public infrastructure, sitting in the open, free, for years. Nobody had simply connected it. The technology was never the bottleneck. We were.
So SolveTO is not a complaint box. It is a city intelligence layer. The reports residents file are the input. The city’s own open data is the context. And Pulse is how you see all of it at once: a living map of the city you can fly over, where every report glows and the whole thing replays through time, so you watch the city quietly fix itself. When a report turns green, the map celebrates it, and the people who did the work, the city’s crews and the contractors alongside them, finally get their name on it. Solved, and solved by you.
The distance is a choice
Singapore runs one platform for an entire country. Canada ranks forty-seventh in the world for digital government. The second city was hard. The fifth city is a Tuesday afternoon. The gap between where we are and one platform for every Canadian city is not a money problem and not a talent problem. It is an architecture problem, which means it is a choice.
Obsession, or stubbornness? Both. And that is the point. You do not need permission, and you do not need to be the smartest person in the room. You just have to refuse to accept that broken is normal.
I wrote the whole talk up, slides and all, on my personal site. Get the full slides here.
