About ImproveBayArea
Independent civic-tech · Bay Area · Free for residents · Free for cities
ImproveBayArea is a Bay Area 311 reporter. Snap a photo, the AI categorizes it, the report files instantly to the right city's official channel — Oakland, Alameda, Emeryville, San Leandro, Walnut Creek, San Rafael, Vallejo, or San Francisco.
It is built and operated by one person, Barklee Sanders, through ESBE Inc. There are no investors, no city contracts, and no advertising. Server costs come out of pocket.
What ImproveBayArea is
- An independent reporting front-end that talks to each city's official, public submission channel.
- Faster than most city apps because the AI fills in the boring parts — category, description, address resolution.
- Privacy-first: no account required to submit, photo EXIF stripped before upload, no ad trackers.
- Accessible: built to WCAG 2.2 AA. Found a barrier? Tell us.
What ImproveBayArea is not
- Not affiliated with any city government, agency, or 311 service.
- Not a replacement for the city's official channels. If your city sends a worker to the wrong place, the city's record is the source of truth, not ours.
- Not for emergencies. Call 911 if someone is in immediate danger.
- Not a startup. No funding round, no exit plan, no growth team.
Why this exists
The official 311 apps in the Bay Area are slow. Filing a single graffiti report through SF311's app takes about a minute of tapping through menus; through ImproveBayArea it takes about ten seconds. That ten-vs-sixty-second gap is the entire reason this tool exists. People who actually file reports — block captains, neighborhood volunteers, retirees who walk the same route every day — file dozens or hundreds a year. The friction adds up.
ImproveBayArea closes that gap without asking the cities to change anything: every submission still goes through their existing public channels, gets the same case ID, follows the same workflow.
How it works under the hood
- Photo → category: Cloudflare Workers AI inspects the photo and proposes a service category. The user can re-classify with one tap.
- Address resolution: GPS from the photo (if present) plus reverse-geocoding produce a human-readable address and a what3words reference, both included in the description so dispatchers don't get lost.
- Submission: posts directly to the city's existing public form or API — SeeClickFix for Oakland and most East Bay cities, the City of San Francisco's public Verint form for SF.
- Tracking: optional sign-in (via Clerk) lets you watch your reports' status without giving us a credit card.
Open source civic infrastructure we depend on
- Cloudflare Workers + Workers AI — runtime and AI
- SeeClickFix Open311 + city public forms — submission backend
- DataSF (
data.sfgov.org) — historical case lookup - OpenFreeMap + OpenStreetMap — basemaps
- what3words — three-word address references for field workers
- Clerk — optional account auth
Where this is going
The roadmap is small on purpose: deduplicate near-duplicate reports before they get filed, make the city-status loop tighter (so you can see when DPW marks your report "in progress"), keep widening Bay Area city coverage. Anything that doesn't directly help residents file a better report or get a better outcome doesn't ship.
Read the receipts
The architecture, terms, and contact channels are all public. The codebase is private for now (operational reasons — the cities' public forms are easy to abuse if every parameter is documented), but the inputs and outputs are inspectable: every case ImproveBayArea files lands in the city's own public dataset.
- Terms of use — including the API-key terms we pre-signed for the City of San Francisco.
- How to reach us — for residents, accessibility issues, and city staff escalations.
- Security policy — how to report a vulnerability.