Team name
Repair My Road

Team members
Danny Henley-Martin, Andrew Booth, Trung Nguyen, Kaegyn Toole, Diego Biancullo

How did the team meet?
Not everyone knew each other, some of us met at uni, while some met at work and we just asked if discussed if we wanted to do something at Hackagong.

What did you build at Hackagong?
We built a mobile application that collects reports from users about potholes that they have discovered while driving. The app then sent this data to a server that filters the results to be displayed and used by governments to repair the potholes that have been reported.

Why that idea and how did it come to you?
Basically, we wanted to go to Hackagong for the experience. But the idea came to a couple of us while we were driving to Hungry Jacks one day when we were taking a break from study. On the way, we saw a few potholes on the Freeway. Haha, it was pretty funny actually because, we said to ourselves, that “this could be an app”, and so we moved forward with that idea.

How was your weekend experience at Hackagong and/or Demo Day?
Our experience at Hackagong was quite good actually, for us, we were learning how to build our app, while creating it on the day, so it was a great experience. One of the best things was just to be in an environment that supported the development of our ideas, and having other people around you working towards something is always a great motivator. Hackagong was probably the best thing to happen for us as a group, and we’ll be sure to go again to the next one. Demo Day was even better, because this is where we were able to present our idea to a crowd of people, find and gain interest, while receiving important feedback about our app, and how we could move forward with it. Making it into the top 10 was crucial for us, because Demo Day would be our platform to push our idea.

What’s next for your product development?
At the moment, we are expanding on our initial app, and building it towards how the government can use the data from the application to make better, quicker and more strategic decisions when it comes to civil works and maintenance on our local and state roads. A big factor is our user-interface development, and how users will interact with the “dashboard”, as well as the mobile application. We’re hoping to pitch the idea to governments soon.

What’s the grand future vision for what it could become?
We are hoping to see our app used by States, and local governments, where citizens as the primary users can report seen potholes, quickly and easily. We also want to provide citizens with some other useful utilities while driving, such as recording journey distance for tax purposes, displaying their current speed, as well as showing traffic congestion around their driving area. We have a couple other things up our sleeves too, but for now they are under wraps.

Are you looking for people to help? If so, who/what do you need?
We may need people in the future, but for the time been we have a fairly good robust team. Anything we require in the future, would be security based, and to provide us with strategic overview of how this could integrate into existing services.

What’s happened with the project since Hackagong?
Since Hackagong, we have been approached by several enthusiastic people that are keen to get on board and help out by providing us with contacts in the government and people that want to be application testers. For us, we’ve continued to work to refine our app and push it further, greatly expanding our analytics user-interface for the government and finding new ways for our data to be useful. But most of all, we’re finding new ways to make the app fun for the everyday citizen and incentivise its use.