Civic Crowdsourcing Apps

Turning the crowdsourcing work toward city problems.

Last updated on Aug 14, 2026 Research

Project Overview

Most of our crowdsourcing work points at the network: users’ own traffic and devices as a source of measurement about the Internet. These two apps pointed the same idea at the city instead, and were built for the Apps 4 Metro Chicago competitions in 2011 and 2012.

The interesting problem in both is not collection but trust. Anyone can file a report; the question is which reports are real, which are duplicates, and which matter enough to act on. That is a validation problem, and it looks a lot like the one in crowdsourced network measurement, where a single client’s view is cheap and unreliable and the value comes from reconciling many of them.

FixIt!

FixIt! crowdsources both the reporting and the validation of issues requiring city attention — broken streetlights, potholes, graffiti. Reports from one user can be confirmed or disputed by others nearby, so the system accumulates evidence rather than just a queue of claims.

It took 5th place in the Apps 4 Metro Chicago Challenge, Community Round.

TrailBlaze Chicago

TrailBlaze Chicago applies the same approach to cycling: planning routes and reporting the current status of bike paths, where conditions change faster than any official dataset can track and the people who know are the ones riding.

It came 2nd in the Apps 4 Metro Chicago Grand Challenge, and 4th in the Transportation Round — first among the not-for-profit entries.

Software

FixIt! — crowdsourced reporting and report-validation of issues requiring city attention.
TrailBlaze Chicago — crowdsourced planning and status reporting for bike paths.

Neither app has a paper of its own. The research questions they touch are treated in our crowdsourcing work: