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Blog

What I'm building, what I'm learning, and why civic tech matters.

· 6 min read 311 toronto accountability open-data civic-tech

97% of them were marked resolved. Drivers are still replacing suspensions.

Toronto's own open data shows 93 road surface complaints about Unwin Avenue since 2011, and 97% of them are marked completed or closed. Drivers on that road are replacing their suspensions. Both things are true, and the gap between them is the whole problem.

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· 3 min read reporting toronto ward-report open-data solvecanada

The question council asked in 2018

In 2018, Toronto city council asked a good question about how long fixes take. It stayed open for seven years. This week, the first Ward Report starts answering it, one ward at a time.

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· 3 min read reporting friction toronto solvecanada

The seat was free the whole time

Why I stand on the subway with an empty seat in front of me, and what that has to do with a city reporting channel nobody uses. The cost people avoid is almost never the one you are measuring.

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· 6 min read solvecanada closing-the-loop toronto

Two weeks of noise

Fourteen days of shipping, talking, and showing up everywhere at once. What it produced, and what I learned about volume.

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· 5 min read closing-the-loop 311 toronto transparency solvecanada

What happens after you hit send

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.

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· 3 min read closing-the-loop 311 toronto business bia

The Business of Broken

Contractors bid on guesswork and BIAs depute without numbers. What changes when the condition of a street stops being a guess.

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· 7 min read closing-the-loop 311 toronto media transparency solvecanada

A former mayor described the gap better than I do

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.

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· 11 min read closing-the-loop 311 toronto transparency accountability solvecanada

Toronto has been trying to close this loop since 2011

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.

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· 4 min read solvecanada city-hall government municipal civic-tech

The report arrives ready to act on

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.

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· 4 min read solvecanada business bia facilities civic-tech

Your front door opens onto a public street

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.

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