Ushahidi — Kenya's Crowdsourced Crisis-Mapping Platform
Kenya
Born in Nairobi during Kenya's 2008 post-election violence, Ushahidi's open-source crowdsourcing platform has since been deployed 150,000+ times in 160+ …
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Street Bump — Boston's Smartphone Pothole-Sensing Pilot and Its Crowdsourcing Limits
United States of America · Boston · See the United States of America profile · See the Boston profile
Top 89% 48/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice
Boston's Street Bump app used phone accelerometers to detect road defects; an open contest with 700+ solvers improved the algorithm and the city reports fixing 1,250 worst manhole covers, but most reports still came from city staff.
Details
- Promoter
- Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, City of Boston
- Period
- 2011-2015
- Keywords
- civic tech, crowdsourcing, road maintenance, urban experimentation
Description
Street Bump was launched by the City of Boston's Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics: a smartphone app that uses the accelerometer and GPS to log likely road defects as users drive.
The first version produced many false positives. The city ran an open contest on InnoCentive that drew more than 700 solvers; three winning solutions shaped Street Bump 2.0.
The city reports from its own initial analysis that false positives fell below 10%, and that sunk manhole covers caused about four times as many bumps as potholes; working with utilities it fixed 1,250 of the worst covers.
A 2015 Harvard case study cautions that progress information is limited and cites reporting that of 19,000 potholes reported in 2014, about 16,000 came from city employees, suggesting the crowd contributed less than the premise implied. No independent evaluation was found.
Read the full analysis: https://d3.harvard.edu/platform-digit/submission/street-bump-crowdsourcing-better-streets-but-many-roadblocks-remain/
Implementation
Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.
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Data sources
Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.
- C-NAPSE web research — accessed 2026-10-08
- Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics, City of Boston — accessed 2026-10-08
- City of Boston: Street Bump — accessed 2026-10-08
- Harvard D3: Street Bump — crowdsourcing better streets, but many roadblocks remain — accessed 2026-10-08
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