Food security
Community gardens, food-rescue networks, fresh-food access in disadvantaged pockets.
01 — Pitch Brief · 2026
Cities have spare capacity. We're building a game that finds it.
MESH turns Melbourne suburbs into a living, multiplayer game of resilience — powered by open data, six AI agents, and the people already doing the work.
thriving at risk under-served
02 — Premise
Resilience is the next civic asset class.
Every Australian suburb is sitting on quiet abundance — gardens that produce too much, retirees who could teach welding, neighbours who'd happily check on each other in a heatwave if anyone asked. The capacity exists. The wiring doesn't.
- i.
Civic capacity is fragmented.
There's no shared map of who can teach what, who has spare zucchini, who's ready in a heatwave. The information lives in group chats, in heads, in council PDFs that nobody reads.
- ii.
Open data is inert.
data.melbourne.vic.gov.au alone publishes 239 datasets. Almost none of them inform a decision a resident will make this week. The data isn't missing — the loop is.
- iii.
The unit of resilience is the suburb.
"City-wide" is too coarse to coordinate; "neighbourhood" is too granular to measure. The 3-mile suburb — Carlton, Footscray, Brunswick — is the natural unit. We score, narrate, and gamify at that scale.
03 — Resilience Pillars
Five dimensions. One score per suburb.
Each pillar maps to a measurable, defensible signal in open data. The resilience index is their average — generated in the database, never written by the app.
Skill density
Neighbourhood houses, free training, who-can-teach-what mapped per postcode.
Resource sharing
Tool libraries, materials exchange, the circular-economy edge of every suburb.
Social connectivity
Foot traffic, third places, the texture of weak ties that holds a place together.
Emergency preparedness
Heatwave plans, defibrillator coverage, who calls who when the grid wobbles.
04 — The Loop
Open data → quests → residents → XP → resilience.
- ASyncDaily pull from data.vic.gov.au + Melbourne open data.
- BScoreFive pillars per suburb. Generated column for r_index.
- CGenerateQuest Generator drafts a quest for the weakest pillar.
- DJoinResidents accept. Steps become a shared checklist.
- EVerifySubmit photo + text. Vision agent awards XP, queues edge cases.
- FReflectNarrator writes the weekly digest. The score moves.
05 — Six Agents
Six narrow agents, one civic mission.
Each agent has a single job and a strict output schema. No hallucinated abundance. No vibe-based moderation. Pin to claude-sonnet-4-20250514.
Quest Generator
Reads suburb data. Proposes the missing initiative.
Conditions on SEIFA, weakest pillar, season, and what was already tried. Returns a 3–5 step plan, an XP reward, and a plain-English rationale.
Submission Verifier
Checks photo + text. Decides if XP is earned.
Vision-capable. Awards XP, queues for human review when confidence drops below 0.7, never silently swallows a submission.
Resource Matchmaker
Pairs supply with demand within 10km.
Semantic match across "I have" and "I need" posts, draft intro message included. Skips when the radius is too sparse to be useful.
Suburb Narrator
Writes a weekly digest of what changed.
Plain text, cached for 7 days, never regenerated mid-week. The narrative is grounded in real pillar deltas, not hallucinated headlines.
Initiative Advisor
Chat. Plans your community project step by step.
Streaming SSE. Injects live suburb context — population, SEIFA, weakest pillar — so the advice is grounded in this postcode, not a generic prompt.
Anomaly Watcher
Notices when a number moves and asks why.
Runs on each data sync. Classifies each delta as opportunity / risk / info and spawns the relevant quest or alert.
06 — The Game Layer
Make showing up feel as good as scrolling.
The point isn't badges. The point is to make a hot tip from a neighbour, a Sunday-morning fence repair, a free CPR class — feel like progress that's seen by your community, not lost to the void.
- XP per quest — easy 100 · medium 300 · hard 700, modulated by the verifier's confidence.
- Suburb leaderboards — postcode pride is real; we lean into it without weaponising it.
- Append-only XP ledger — every award is auditable. No silent admin claw-backs.
- Personal badges — earned, not bought. Tied to specific local acts.
07 — Provenance
We tell you what's real.
data.melbourne.vic.gov.au only covers the City of Melbourne LGA. Suburbs across the river get SEIFA-derived approximations. The app records this per-row, in code, so nobody is misled.
Suburb LGA Food Skills Resources Social Emergency
Carlton Melbourne real real real real real
Fitzroy Yarra seifa real real real seifa
Brunswick Merri-bek seifa seifa seifa seifa seifa
Footscray Maribyrnong seifa seifa seifa seifa seifa
Richmond Yarra seifa seifa seifa seifa seifa
real — pulled from a survey or sensor seifa — approximated from ABS 2021 IRSD decile
Datasets used
- social-indicators-for-city-of-melbourne-residents-2023 — City of Melbourne resident survey. Feeds food security + emergency preparedness for Carlton.
- landmarks-and-places-of-interest — spatial filter within 1.5 km of each centroid drives skill density + resource sharing.
- pedestrian-counting-system-monthly-counts-per-hour — hourly counts within radius drive the social-connectivity score.
- ABS 2021 SEIFA (IRSD decile) — hand-curated reference values in
scripts/seed-suburbs.ts. Used as the fallback for any pillar with no direct signal. - OpenStreetMap via Nominatim — suburb boundary polygons fetched once by
pnpm fetch:suburb-geointosrc/lib/data/suburb-geometries.json.
08 — Stack
Boring tech, bold ambitions.
- FrontendSvelteKit 2 + Svelte 5 runes
- MapGoogle Maps · WebGL vector · 2.5D tilt + 3D buildings
- DataSupabase, Postgres 15, PostGIS
- AgentsClaude Sonnet 4 · pinned model
- DeployVercel (adapter-vercel)
- Open dataOpendatasoft v2.1 · CKAN v3
09 — Roadmap
Ten sprints. We're on three.
- 00
Foundations
SvelteKit scaffold, Vercel deploy, brand bones
- 01
Data pipeline
Open-data wrappers, real-data seed
- 02
Schema & types
Migrations + typed Supabase client (offline)
- 03
Map (2.5D)
Google Maps WebGL vector + tilt + 3D buildings + 2D/3D toggle
- 04
Auth & profile
Demo personas + Admin role + /admin route; magic-link gated on Supabase
- 05
Quests UI
Seeded + AI cards, EXAMPLE/AI chips, persistence; submission UI in 07
- 06
Quest Generator
Endpoint + signal strip + How-this-was-created panel; edge-fn pending
- 07
Submission Verifier
Vision agent, photo verification
- 08
Matchmaker + Exchange
Resource board + AI pairing
- 09
Narrator + Advisor
Both agents live; weekly cron pending
- 10
Polish + launch
Anomaly Watcher, a11y, public beta
10 — Join
Built in Melbourne. Open to collaborators.
MESH is a prototype, deliberately scoped: five suburbs, six agents, ten sprints. If the loop works at this scale, it scales sideways to every LGA in the country.