No one should lose their day to waiting.

Someone was missing.

It starts with a passport to sort out. Booking online: the next slot is two months away. That leaves walking in — but how long is the wait on site? No website says.

I caught myself wishing for something very simple: that someone there — a clerk, a regular, anyone at all — would tell me when it is quieter. That person existed nowhere. The information did: published as open data, and in the heads of everyone who had just been through. Just not where it was needed, and not when it was needed.

So I spent two months building that someone.

Then I drove over to file my application. iCivic's very first report is one I made that day, in that queue.

Today, that someone is all of us. At the passport office, at the SAAQ, at your municipal counter, two taps are enough to say what you see: it's long, it's fine, it's empty. Ten seconds of your time, and the person who was about to set off knows what to expect. No stored trace ties it back to you, and proximity is checked on the device: only a “yes, on site” is sent.

And we also say when we plan to go. Because an hour announced as quiet draws everyone to the same hour — and stops being quiet. A forecast destroys itself by spreading. Shared intentions therefore feed into the calculation, alongside the open data published by public administrations and the prediction models. We don't just read the best time: we share it out.