Spothole — civic data, gamified.
A gamified, crowdsourced system that incentivises citizens to aggregate information about civic infrastructure issues. We started with potholes (hence the name) and built map-on-map algorithms paired with partnerships with the Namma Bengaluru Foundation and Ola Cabs.
Civic complaints don't scale. Civic games do.
Reporting a pothole the traditional way — phone call, written complaint, forwarded form — is high-friction and low-reward. Most people simply don't bother. We flipped the model: turn each pothole report into a miniature game move, where citizens compete on a leaderboard and municipal corporators get scored on responsiveness.
Rewards for points earned came from local establishment partnerships; the gamification was layered both at the citizen tier and at the political-representative tier — an unusual mechanic at the time.
From a hackathon idea to municipal partnerships.
- Crowdsourced reporting — geo-tagged photos with severity scoring.
- Two-tier gamification — citizens earn points; corporators earn responsiveness scores.
- Map-on-map algorithms — novel geospatial techniques for routing road-quality overlays.
- Reward marketplace tied to local merchant partnerships.
- Routing API ambition — quality-of-roads as a queryable layer for navigation software.
- Strategic partnerships with Namma Bengaluru Foundation and Ola Cabs.
Walkthrough.
