Ahmed Nadar
Tonight I gave a talk at Civic Tech Toronto. This is the short version of it, and the slides are yours at the bottom if you want to take the whole thing with you. It started with a pothole For about eight months I drove past the same pothole near my house. Every single day. And I became,...
Ahmed Nadar
A city already owns the data. It could plug a new tool into what it has in an afternoon. And it won’t, because a contract signed three years ago says the work belongs to a vendor whose product was current the day the ink dried. I build civic software, so I see government technology from the side...
Ahmed Nadar
A city looks after itself in a thousand small acts nobody sees. A drain gets cleared. A burnt-out light comes back on. A pothole somebody reported on a Tuesday is gone by Friday. It happens around you all the time, and almost none of it is visible to the people it happens for. I built something...
Ahmed Nadar
A few hours ago a resident in Milton filed a report about a dip in the road that turns into a puddle in the rain and a sheet of ice in the winter. A minute later it was in front of the Town and in front of their ward councillor, with the location, the photo, and the surrounding street attached....
Ahmed Nadar
There is a pothole I swerved for months on my street in Toronto, and the only reason I never reported it is that reporting it took longer than living with it. So in February I built a way to do it in about thirty seconds. You take a photo, the report writes itself, and it reaches the city and your...
Ahmed Nadar
Singapore built OneService and solved something Canada still hasn’t. One app, one login, one interface for every city in the country. A resident reports a pothole, a noisy site, a flooded drain, and the same flow finds the right agency every time. Move across the island and you don’t relearn...
Ahmed Nadar
A few weeks into building SolveTO, someone mentioned that Toronto’s council voting records were sitting on open data. I went looking, expecting a gap. Instead I found everything. Meeting minutes, motion text, vote tallies councillor by councillor, going back years. All public, all free, and all...
Ahmed Nadar
I think about civic reporting as a relationship between two people who never meet. One person sees something wrong on the street and decides to say something. Another person, somewhere in the photo, never asked to be part of it. Most reporting tools forget that both of them exist. I built two...