If you think about it, the more than 75 million people who have downloaded Pokemon Go are quite literally hand surveying their cities, fanning out and scouring their city labyrinths, traversing even remote little-accessed areas. As they stroll through less heavily trafficked areas of their cities, players are coming across everything from illegal landfills to robberies in progress to dead bodies. Obviously in the case of the latter, players simply call the police, but what about the myriad environmental issues players stumble upon?
Picture for a moment what it would look like if Pokemon Go simply added a button where players could report non-emergency environmental or safety issues such as large potholes, missing manhole covers, uneven sidewalks or illegal landfills as they come across them? A player would simply click this button and it would use the phone’s camera to take a picture, record the GPS coordinate and dispatch to a central GIS map of the city. City maintenance workers could issue work orders for potholes and other safety issues, but the environmental issues such as dumping grounds could also be shared with NGOs and volunteer organizations.