Be at the place. Find out what it’s all about.
“Where you fell in love. Where someone broke your heart. Where you took a walk before you decided to sign the divorce papers. Where you heard when someone died. It’s a storytelling tool for me.”
Berlin, 2017. The team project inside The DO School’s audio challenge, posed by Axel Springer and six German radio stations. I pitched it; four of us built it. When the programme ended, the fellows’ accounts were deactivated — and every working file went with them. What survives: one Drive notification, one photograph, and one email I sent myself, trying out names.
Voices of the city · Let the city come alive · Hear the sounds of the city · Listen to the city · Bringing cities alive · Explore. Hear. Share · Stories everywhere. · Put your voice on the map · Stories of the city
The discovery mechanic, in my words from the room: like pokémon — you catch the story, it propels you to walk. Niantic walked that exact road to Pokémon GO. They kept the game and dropped the stories.
CUE had four hands on it. Look where they went.
seventeen years old in that berlin room — the youngest hands on CUE, and the only one still posting about it a year later. he founded his first venture at thirteen. since then: recognised by the UN in 2019 for grassroots climate action, on pakistan’s national assembly climate committee helping draft the COP26 agenda, a COP26 speaker for one young world, WEF global shaper, co-founder of youth embassy and of climate forward pakistan — which now sends its own youth delegations to every COP. this year he is back where CUE started: berlin, facilitating dialogue for finland’s timeout foundation.
learned the camera in kibera from a stranger who lent him equipment, and built it into blackboy entertainment — then a media lab training young kenyans in film and storytelling. after berlin he founded DOx nairobi to carry the method home. award-winning filmmaker, musician, unstoppable.
built theacare, a women’s health platform that grew to a community of 100,000 women, then co-founded gytree; curated femmecon, india’s first women’s health festival; now at the yale school of public health. four years after berlin she turned up on aurat raaj’s own blog, talking menstrual waste — the team never really dispersed.
she kept the CUE logo folder in 2017 — the artifact the deactivated accounts took with them. of the four of us, she became the one who builds AI for a living: senior product manager at ebay, making genAI work at 150-million-user scale; before that, AI products inside a fortune-20 healthcare company. co-founder of product garage, head of partnerships at women in AI ireland — and the loudest voice in any room for building it responsibly.
nineteen fellows, fourteen countries, ten weeks. one audio challenge team. everyone on it went home and built the thing their city needed.
One self-contained page. No server, no install, no login.
The map is never empty — the city’s own past is pinned before anyone contributes.
Calls, not an open box — a named question, a steward, a deadline.
Text first, voice as the reward — the line is required, the recording optional.
Read at distance, hear on the spot — voices only play within earshot.
Circles, not a public — a constituency and a steward, not one global map.
Fails closed — one report mutes a story pending a human; nothing to farm, nothing to win.
Portable — export the whole circle as a plain file, any time, no account.
A web page, not an app — nothing to install, nothing to rebuild.
A business in Berlin.
A constituency in Karachi.
The revenue idea is Mustafa’s Gemüse Kebap, Mehringdamm 32: the shop buys a pin at its own coordinates and tells its founding story in the owner’s voice — the ad is a story, or it does not run. No advertising in the personal layer, ever. And one coincidence worth keeping: pitch night was at Mehringdamm 33. CUE was pitched across the street from its own business model.
The opening is Karachi, not Berlin. Queering the Map’s biggest growth event in nine years was a Pakistani TikToker — 250,000 visitors in one month — while Pakistan’s largest oral-history archives sit unmapped. Demand is proven with a number; supply is entirely foreign-built. The default circle in the app: Karachi · the ones who left.
still unresolved, said out loud: the calls need a human behind them · the pin needs a first paying customer · the shared layer needs a real build · audio remains a hypothesis, not a proof.