Civic tech · Government
A US civic-technology programme where trained volunteers report disabled-parking violations from a phone, and those reports move through a government review process into real, enforceable citations — with the resulting fines directed to accessibility charities.
Because the output is a citation someone can contest in court, not a record in a database, every part of the system had to be built to a legal standard rather than a reporting one — the evidence chain, the state machine, and the integration that hands citations to the court's own system of record.
// the problem
A US civic-technology programme lets trained volunteers report disabled-parking violations from a phone. The hard part was never capturing a photo — it was turning that photo into a citation a government office could issue and a person could contest in court, across multiple municipalities that each run their own process.
// engineering
A violation moves through report, administrative approval, vehicle lookup, reporter certification, government approval and citation issuance, on to hearing, payment or closure. Modelling every one of those states explicitly, rather than a handful of statuses with side flags, is what lets a citation be traced back to exactly how it was produced when someone disputes it.
The phone submits a cryptographic hash of the photo and its background audio, encrypted under a per-session public key, at the moment of capture. That gives the programme a way to prove evidence was not altered after the fact — the property that matters when a citation ends up in front of a hearing officer, not when it's first reviewed.
Each government office is its own tenant, with its own citation, warning and placard-letter templates and its own field mappings. The workflow logic is shared; the paperwork is not, because no two municipalities issue a citation the same way.
Citations export to the court's case-management system as XML over secure file transfer, and the resulting case outcomes are ingested back in. The platform tracks a citation through its lifecycle, but it never tries to be the authority the court already is.
// result
A violation lifecycle of more than twenty states carries a report from a volunteer's phone through administrative and government approval to citation issuance, hearing, payment or closure, backed by tamper-evident evidence and running across multi-tenant government offices each with their own templates and field mappings. State vehicle-registry lookups, online fine payment, generated PDF citations, two-way messaging between deputies and violators, an accessible-parking spot database with crowd-sourced suggestions and comments, and a charity directory for directing fines all sit on top of a granular permission model, sixty database migrations and a documented API.
The evidence has to hold up months later in front of a hearing officer who never saw the original scene — that constraint shaped the state machine, the evidence pipeline and the integration work more than any single feature did.
Event-driven backend · Relational database · Secure file transfer integration · Cryptographic evidence pipeline · Multi-tenant administration layer
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