Your city's public realm, captured block by block.
CAW sends local spotters along assigned zones to capture the real condition of sidewalks, street trees, lighting, and more. Cities and operators get current, ground-level data. Privacy is built into every capture.
Launching in Vancouver
A field network for public-realm condition data. Spotters walk the city. The city sees itself clearly.
Sidewalks crack, trees overgrow, lights fail, and bins overflow. Most of it goes unrecorded until someone complains. CAW turns ordinary people walking ordinary blocks into a steady, current read on the condition of the shared spaces a city is responsible for.
What we capture
The spotter loop, point to point.
Four steps, the same every time. Accept a zone, walk the route, capture, and get paid for what you turn in.
Accept a zone
Take on a geographic zone near you. Your walking route is laid out on the map, street by street, before you set out.
Walk the route
A live overlay in the camera keeps you on the line, with the next turn always in view. Follow the gold path and keep the street in frame.
Capture as you walk
The capture runs on its own as you move, a continuous 360 sweep of the streetscape. You never touch a shutter. Faces and plates are blurred before the imagery is used for anything.
Submit and earn
Captures are confirmed and your earnings are tracked in plain numbers you can see, capture by capture.
Four Vancouver pilot zones are mapped and ready to walk, each a street-following route from live map data with a 360 panorama every 20 metres. These numbers are live from the field and fill in as spotters complete their first walks.
Watch a sweep happen
One walk, street by street
A route is laid over the zone's streets. The spotter walks the sidewalk beside the gold line while the camera captures on its own, a frame every few metres and a slow look-around at panorama points. Every frame lands with its exact position and heading, building a current record of the sidewalks, trees, lighting, and public space along the route.
- 01The route is generated from real street data, no lane walking, sidewalks only.
- 02Capture runs hands-free as the spotter walks. Turns and panorama points are called out on screen.
- 03Frames upload as they go, blurred before any use, and assemble into a street-level record of the zone.
The full capture flow · 27 seconds
Get paid to know your city.
If you have a phone and time to walk, you can earn with CAW. You choose when to go out. You capture public space, not sales. And what you make is always clear.
A phone is the gear
No equipment to buy. Your phone and comfortable shoes are everything you need to start.
Walk when it suits you
Take a zone when you have the time. There are no shifts and no quotas to chase.
Pay you can read
Earnings are tracked per capture in plain numbers. No mystery, no fine print.
No selling, ever
You record the condition of public space. No cold calls, no pitches, no pressure.
Fly a drone? As zones open up, there will be aerial capture work for certified pilots too. Tell us when you join.
Current data on the realm you maintain.
CAW gives you a steady, ground-level read on the condition of your public assets, zone by zone, on a cadence you set. You see what is happening on the ground before it becomes a complaint, and you build the barrier record your accessibility plan already requires.
Request a briefingBarrier identification, on a cadence
Under the Accessible British Columbia Act, every BC municipality has to identify and remove barriers in its built environment and keep that plan current. CAW turns that recurring obligation into a standing, photographic record instead of an occasional manual audit.
Zone-level intelligence
Condition reporting organized by zone. The asset and the area are the subject, never an individual address.
The assets you answer for
Sidewalks, street trees, lighting, graffiti, accessibility, waste, and more across the public realm.
On your schedule
Captured on the cadence you choose, so the picture stays current instead of going stale between audits.
You own your asset data
The condition data on your public assets is yours, delivered in a form your teams can act on.
Privacy-compliant by design
Blurring and data minimization are built into the capture, not added after the fact.
For municipalities, parks boards, transit agencies, utilities, business improvement areas, and researchers studying the pedestrian environment.
Privacy is in the capture, not bolted on.
The public realm is what CAW exists to record. Everything in the design works to keep it that way, and to keep people who happen to be on the street out of the record.
01
Blurred before use
Faces and licence plates are blurred when imagery enters our systems, before anything is reviewed, assessed, or delivered to anyone.
02
Not a public map
Imagery is held securely and used to assess the condition of public assets. It is never published as a browsable map of anyone's street.
03
The infrastructure is the subject
CAW is built to record the shared infrastructure a city maintains, the sidewalks, curbs, trees, lighting, and public space between buildings. That is what the sweep is for, and what the data describes. Anything else in frame is incidental, and treated that way.
04
No identification, and real recourse
CAW never runs facial recognition and never attempts to identify anyone who happens to be in frame. And if you believe you or your vehicle appear in a capture, one email to privacy@cawapp.ca gets it located, masked, or deleted.
Ground truth for the inclusive city.
UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 commits cities to accessible public space for everyone, and its own indicator methodology names the weakness: mapped data is only "potential" public space until someone validates it on the ground. That validation, on foot, at the pedestrian scale, is what CAW is built to produce.
How CAW maps to SDG 11UN SDG 11 · PROGRESS DATA
48.0% → 45.9%
Share of urban population with convenient access to open public space, 2020–2025. The world agreed to measure inclusive public space, and the trend is going the wrong way. Better ground truth is where fixing that starts.
Rollout
We are starting where we live, then expanding zone by zone.
The things people ask first.
Do I need any equipment?
How do I actually get paid?
Is this door-to-door sales?
What about people's privacy?
Do I have to commit to a schedule?
Who buys this data, and what do they get?
Which areas can I walk right now?
Can I capture by drone?
Be first on the ground.
Spotters, cities, and partners can join the waitlist now. We are onboarding the first Vancouver zones and will reach out as they open.
No spam. We only write when a zone near you opens.
You are on the list.
We will be in touch as we open zones near you. Watch for a note from CAW.