On a recent sweltering Saturday afternoon, a dozen people met up in Valenzuela, a city just outside Manila, to search for manholes and utility poles and snap photos of them.
The infrastructure hunters were there because they found each other on the Discord channel for Tekkon, a Pokemon Go-like app that uses crowdsourcing to collect information that public utilities need to keep power lines and water networks operating smoothly.
By gamifying infrastructure data and selling it to utilities, Tekkon wants to help lower the cost of maintenance by providing incentives for citizens to gather information from their communities. Tekkon lets users take dog avatars for ...