Designing Crowdsourcing Software to Inform Municipalities About Infrastructure Condition

Determining how to utilize and allocate budgets for public infrastructure is an essential issue that local governments face. For a beneficial budgeting plan to be made for civil engineering infrastructure maintenance and projects, a local government needs first to know the condition of its infrastructure. Without such information, it is not possible to create a plan that will use funds effectively and address the needs and desires of the community members. For larger bodies, like state governments or populous cities, collecting this information is achievable through the dedication of workforce and surveyors. However, smaller municipalities can often lack the funds and the resources. Consequently, this will foster reactive management of public infrastructure such that information is collected after an issue occurs and becomes major rather than minor, so repairs can be more expensive if the damage is significant. This only applies more strain to the limited budgets. To solve this issue, crowdsourcing information about the condition of public infrastructure from the community in the municipality can be used. Therefore, we developed a crowdsourcing based system to address this issue. The data will be collected through the use of public software that will seek to collect data and encourage users to report about all issues-, not just severe or significant damages. By receiving reports about all issues, regardless of severity, municipalities will have the information not only to react to and fix the damage, but also they may proactively predict, repair, and prevent severe damages based on timelines of reports about more minor issues. Moreover, upon the adaptation of this method proves to be helpful, this research aims to produce and deploy such software to benefit smaller municipalities.