South African developer and entrepreneur Johann du Toit has launched an online interactive map to help residents of Cape Town keep up to date with scheduled electricity load shedding plans.
Speaking to HumanIPO, du Toit said the map is intended to simplify and clarify load shedding schedules, given the official website is number-heavy and difficult and time consuming to navigate.
“I was chilling at home and wanted to check how load shedding is going to affect me,” said du Toit.
“I found this page for Cape Town. But was very confused. Too many numbers for my feeble mind,” he said, adding he had to scroll through pages of maps to locate the information relevant to his own area.
“I thought if I’m struggling with this others are too. So let’s make it cool!
“I wanted to provide a more visual interactive way to view the schedules. That will allow you to still see the same info from the page but immediately be able to use it and get your info.”
du Toit said he wanted to go further than just posting basic maps, however, and instead decided to add extra functionalities enabling users to view maps of where load shedding is occurring in real-time.
“When a bored programmer looking for something to do finds a bad experience online that they can improve this happens,” du Toit said.
“Two hours later we had a interactive map for the schedule. Local problems being solved by locals scratching their own itches.”
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
