Mission & Vision

The moment this started

In February 2023, Cyclone Gabrielle cut off large parts of the North Island's East Coast.

Farmers and neighbours knew what was going on around them. They could see the slip, the flooded crossing, the road that was gone, and each of them held a piece of the picture.

What nobody had was the whole picture. There was no way to bring those pieces together into one clear overview of what was happening and what was needed where. Without it, Civil Defence, emergency services and the volunteers on the ground had a harder, slower job coordinating the response than they needed to.

GeoMarqr is that overview.

What we believe

• Information should be democratised.

  What is happening on a road should not be known only to whoever has the budget for a survey, a control room or a contract. On GeoMarqr the farmer, the truck driver and the Civil Defence coordinator look at the same public map, and any of them can add to it. Think of a traffic jam: the first person in the queue can see what happened while everyone behind is guessing, but one photo from the front and the whole queue knows what is going on.

• Communities are first responders.

  Before the helicopters arrive and the field teams mobilise, ordinary people are already there, standing in it and taking photos without being asked. Most of those photos never leave the phone, because there is nowhere to send them that reaches the emergency services and coordinators running the response. That knowledge is perishable and irreplaceable, and GeoMarqr gives it somewhere to go.

• Reliability is a moral responsibility.

  GeoMarqr has to keep working when power, phone lines and mobile networks fail. If it goes down during a disaster, the cost is not a bad review but slower help, and possibly lives, so we build for that standard.

• Privacy and data security, by design.

  You never need an account to add a photo, and a photo stays on the public map only while it is useful. New uploads are held privately until they have been checked, and we audit our own security and fix what we find. A tool built on community trust cannot also be a surveillance layer: people who report hazards are doing something generous, and we won't exploit that.

• Quality over quantity.

  In an emergency, trust matters more than anything, and one wrong pin can lose it. A report that points to the wrong place sends responders in the wrong direction, so the location must be right every time, even when the network isn't. The same goes for the time a photo was taken, and for keeping old photos off the live map. We would rather show fewer photos you can rely on than a map full of ones you can't.

• What people see is theirs to share.

  Real-time information about a place cuts both ways: the platform that warns a family about a slip can also show where an alcohol checkpoint is. We don't decide which of those the world gets to see. Anyone, anywhere, can share what is in front of them, and others can act on it. The line is people, not places. You can share what is happening at a location, but you cannot use a photo to identify, harass, threaten or expose a person, and we take those photos down.

• Open, and real about it.

  We work in the open and show our working. The roadmap is public, including the dates we miss, and we say who pays us and what for, how photos are checked, and what gets taken down. When we get something wrong, you can see it and tell us. We are also honest about what an open map shows. Disasters and crashes are ugly, some photos will be hard to look at, and some people will use the map badly. We remove what breaks our rules, not what is merely uncomfortable.

How we design

Our design method is human-centred. We start with the person holding the phone, who may be on the side of a road, in the rain, with one hand free and no signal, and work back from there.

Friction kills reporting. Every extra tap is a report that doesn't happen, and every login screen is someone who drove past and decided it was too hard. A simple report that gets made is worth far more than a detailed one that doesn't.

Accuracy against ease of use. A photo taken inside the app is the most accurate, because the app records where and when at the moment you take it. But most people take the photo first and only realise later that it matters, so you can also share a photo already on your phone, and we read the place and time the phone stored inside it. That is a little less certain. If a photo has no location stored in it, a signed-in user can place the pin by hand, but a guest can't post it. We accept that trade: slightly less certainty, in exchange for a photo that would otherwise never be shared.

What about dead zones?

Telcos and satellite providers are promising an end to dead zones within five years. That will probably come true for field crews with the right plan and the right phone, but it won't be true for everyone, everywhere, in the middle of a storm when towers lose power.

GPS doesn't need a mobile signal, so GeoMarqr records where you stood either way and sends the photo as soon as it can. Better coverage only means it gets there sooner.

What success looks like

In five years

A Civil Defence coordinator opens the dashboard during a weather event and sees the East Coast already filling with community reports, before her first field team has left the carpark. She makes three deployment decisions in the first hour that she couldn't have made without that picture. Two of them save time. One of them saves something more.

A crash closes a state highway. Within minutes, three drivers stuck in the queue and a cyclist on the other side of the road have each shared what they saw, all pinned to the same place and the same few minutes. When the insurer looks at the claim, the whole picture is in one place: where the vehicles ended up, what the road was like, what the weather was doing. An honest claim is settled faster. A dishonest one is much harder to make.

In ten years

The question "what does the road look like right now?" has an answer. It doesn't come from a satellite pass, a survey scheduled six months ago, or a phone call to a contractor who might have driven that way last week. It comes from the people who are on that road, right now.

By then most cars may carry cameras, as some already do. They could hold a live picture of every road. Who owns that picture? Who gets to see it, and what does it mean for the privacy of everyone it catches? We don't have those answers. We do know where we start from. On GeoMarqr, the photo belongs to the person who took it, and what it shows is there for everyone to see. It goes on a public map, not into a private cloud where whoever holds it decides who else gets to look, and at what price.

Who pays for it

Adding a photo to GeoMarqr is free and has to stay free. A report that costs money doesn't happen. But servers, moderation and maps cost money, and someone has to pay for the upkeep.

We are open to revenue streams, as long as they are transparent and honest. You should always be able to see who pays us, and what for.

Two we are open to, neither built yet: teams paying for their own tools, and newsrooms paying to publish a photo.

If a newsroom buys a photo, the money should go to the person who took it. If nobody put their name to it, the money should keep the map running. And you must be able to say no: a photo whose owner has opted out is never sold.

What we are not building

• A surveillance platform.
• A council complaints tool for potholes.
• Another app that needs onboarding, a tutorial, and a support ticket when something breaks.
• Something that works great in Auckland and fails in Ruatoria.

For us, the edge case is the use case. The person on a gravel road in a cyclone, with no signal and three bars of battery, is exactly who we are building for, and we build for them first.

The values behind every decision

• Accuracy over speed.

  In an emergency, a fast wrong answer is dangerous, so we take the time to get the pin right.

• Simplicity over features.

  The best interface is the one that disappears. If we find ourselves adding complexity, we are probably solving the wrong problem.

• Community over institution.

  We exist to amplify what communities already know and do. GeoMarqr is infrastructure that emergency services and communities share, not an authority that sits above them.

• Trust over growth.

  We will not trade the trust of the people who use GeoMarqr in a crisis for user numbers, ad revenue, or a partnership that asks us to compromise the data.

• Built in New Zealand, for conditions that are real.

  We design for the conditions of an actual civil emergency, not a demo or a city centre: places where the road ends, the signal dies, and the only thing that matters is whether the photo got through.

A note on the name

A marq is a mark: something left at a place to say this happened here.

GeoMarqr is the act of leaving that mark accurately and quickly enough for it to matter to the people responding.

To see what we are building to get there, and what we have shipped so far, read the roadmap.