Students
Which study spots are quiet after six, where the sockets are, and which door is the unlocked one.
UTech · UWI Mona · Kingston
What's open, what's busy, what's flooded.
A live map of your campus and neighbourhood, updated by the people already there. Reports expire on their own, so it never goes stale.
What people put on it
Bathrooms
Food
Study spots
Charging
Flooding
Outages
Queues
Free Post publicly, or only to your group.
By Kuane Forrest and Kimani Mcleish
Who it's for
Locals
The outage, the water lock-off, the flooded corner and the road nobody is getting through, on the streets you use.
Private groups
A flat, a class, a crew. Its own pins and its own reports over the same streets, visible to nobody outside it.
What's on it
Five things, added by whoever was standing there.
Other maps know where the buildings are. They don't know that the third floor is dead quiet after six, that the north door is the unlocked one, or that the queue has been out the door since noon.
Pins
Places that stay put. Bathrooms, food, pharmacies, study spaces, charging. Each one carries the building, the floor, and how to actually get in: the door code, which entrance, what to say at the desk.
Reports
What's true this afternoon and won't be tomorrow. A lift out of service, a flooded path, a kitchen that's stopped serving. Every one is born with an expiry.
Area alerts
A report covers a point; an alert covers ground. Flooding, an outage, a water lock-off, a road closed, a missing person, each one drawn as a circle over the stretch it affects.
Events
Anything at a place and a time. RSVP, see who's coming, and find it waiting under Upcoming when the day arrives.
Reviews
A rating and a sentence, so "there's a bathroom here" becomes "there's a clean one here, and the second floor is better."
Status
Where it is, and what it's like right now.
A pin says the place exists. A status says what it's like this minute: whether the queue is out the door, whether the ATM still has cash, whether the lift is working. Every one is chosen from a list rather than typed, so busy means the same thing at every counter on campus and two places can be compared without reading two paragraphs.
Setting one is a tap on the way past, which is the only reason anybody ever does it. And a status expires like everything else here, so a queue that has gone does not sit there all week saying it hasn't.
How busy it is
Quiet
Moderate
Busy
Packed
The canteen
Open
Crowded
Slow service
Out of stock
The ATM
Out of cash
Long queue
Card only
Working again
Getting in
Elevator out
Ramp blocked
Door issue
Search
47A1
47
Building
A
Floor
1
Room
Building 47, first floor, room 1.
Campus mode
Your timetable says 47A1. The map knows where that is.
Turn on campus mode and the map scopes itself to the grounds you're standing on. UTech and UWI Mona are both traced from their real outlines rather than a box drawn around them, and walking routes are worked out on the phone from the buildings themselves, so they still work on the third floor with no signal.
At UTech a timetable code is something you can search. 47A1 resolves to building 47 and walks you to it, and it says out loud that the letter is a floor, which is the half of the code nobody ever explains. Mona numbers its rooms differently, so the decoder stays quiet there rather than guessing at somebody else's convention.
Inside the app
What it looks like when you're using it.
A pin, opened
Directions, who put it there, and the question that keeps it honest.
Raising an alert
Pick the kind, say how bad it is, add a photo. All of it on one screen.
Choosing who sees it
Public, or one of your groups, decided before you add anything.
Why it stays true
Nobody comes back to delete things.
That's how every community map rots. So on Cite nothing temporary has to be cleaned up by hand. A report is filed with a lifespan matched to how long it could plausibly still be true, and when that runs out it leaves on its own. Replies extend it. Silence doesn't.
Pins are permanent, so they get asked instead. Every pin carries one question. Is this still accurate? Two taps to answer it.
| Kind | Lifespan |
|---|---|
| Food status | 6 hours |
| General | 12 hours |
| Hazard | 24 hours |
| Safety | 48 hours |
| Accessibility | 3 days |
| Campus update | 7 days |
Who sees it
Public, or just your people.
Some things belong on the open map. Some belong to five people and nobody else. One switch decides which, and it sits at the top of the map rather than inside settings, so you always know which map you're adding to before you add to it.
A group is a private layer over the same streets: its own pins, its own reports, visible to its members and no one else.
Run one of these places?
People are already posting your queue, your stock and your card machine. Claim your place and it is you setting what is true there, with your hours, your menu and your events on the pin.
Get Cite
It's on the App Store.
Free, and worth something the first time you open it: the map is already carrying what people put on it today.
No account needed to look around.
On Android?
Leave an email and we will send one message the day it opens there. That is the only thing the address is for.
Free A note now to confirm it, then one message when Android opens. We will not sell or share your address.