Making remote construction work easier to verify

Context

Operating situation

Construction progress can be difficult to judge from occasional messages and photographs. Work may be covered before it is inspected, while an owner who cannot visit regularly has to rely on other people’s accounts of the project, the contractor and each request for payment.

The problem

Project owners, especially those managing construction from abroad, needed better evidence of who they were hiring, what had been completed on site and whether a funded task was ready for payment.

Operating constraints

• Owners and experts could be in different locations and needed a shared record of the agreed work.
• Photographs and videos needed enough context to support progress review rather than act as isolated updates.
• Experts needed confidence that task funds existed, while owners needed a review point before payment was released.
• Disagreements required explicit response windows and a final arbitration path.

My contribution

• Expert identity and address verification
• Expert project portfolios
• Mapped projects and scheduled tasks
• Bidding and escrow-funded work
• Geotagged progress reporting
• Dispute and arbitration workflow

How the system worked

1. 01

   I built identity and address checks for experts registering as individuals or organisations. Experts could also describe previous projects and attach photographs so prospective clients had more than a verbal claim to assess.

2. 02

   Owners could place a project on Google Maps, divide it into separate tasks and define each task’s conditions, start time, deadline and recurrence. Experts submitted bids, and the accepted quote was paid into escrow before work began.

3. 03

   Depending on the task, experts submitted daily or weekly updates with photographs and video. I added geotagging so an image’s recorded location could be checked against the project site and compared with earlier reports.

4. 04

   I also built the dispute process. Either party could raise a dispute; the other had one business week to respond. Unresolved cases moved to a platform arbitrator who heard both sides before making the final decision.

Important system decisions

• Model work as separately funded tasks so progress, evidence and payment could be reviewed at the level where a problem occurred.
• Record recurring reporting requirements explicitly instead of relying on informal promises to send updates.
• Attach location evidence to submitted images and retain earlier updates for comparison over time.
• Encode dispute deadlines and arbitration responsibility so escrow release was governed by a visible process.

What this demonstrates

The same structure can help any organisation that pays for work it cannot inspect continuously: define completion, decide what evidence must be submitted and make responsibility for approval or dispute resolution explicit.