Compass

Compass is a platform designed to reorient global hackathons toward grounded, collective impact by connecting local community stakeholders and their needs with builders, funders, and organizers. Through a system of verified issue-sourcing, Compass enables communities —especially those historically excluded from innovation spaces— to articulate concrete problems they face. These needs are translated into actionable prompts and integrated into the hackathon's unique workflow as complements to bounties, featured challenges, or curated tracks, compatible with existing parameters on the organizer's side, and as hackathon ideas on the builder's side.

Rather than relying on the benevolence of sponsors or organizers to champion local relevance, Compass embeds mechanisms of accountability, visibility, and reciprocity at the protocol and UI/UX levels. It makes the “localhost” visible at the global scale.

The platform includes:

Issue Verification Layer: A lightweight, trust-based system (potentially leveraging proof-of-humanity or social attestations) for validating that submitted problems are grounded in lived experiences of specific communities. Navigator Dashboard: A UI for organizers and curators to browse, cluster, and remix community-sourced issues into complements to hackathon bounties, specific challenges, or even curated tracks, and ensure issue diversity and locality. Builder Interface: Participants can filter challenges by locality, theme, or affected group; form teams based on shared affinities; and explore historical issue–solution–adoption arcs. Reciprocity Layer: A system that tracks whether projects born from local issues return value to the communities of origin —whether through royalties, integrations, or future collaborations. Compass operates on the principle of cosmolocalism: making the local visible, meaningful, and influential in the global digital commons. It draws inspiration from concepts like “Sympoiesis”, derived from Greek words meaning "making-with", pointing at interdependence and co-creation. Ultimately, Compass acts as a kind of digital grandmother —grounded, wise, and quietly routing energy toward the heart of things.

The system is designed to be integrated into existing hackathon platforms (e.g., ETHGlobal, DoraHacks, Devfolio) as an opt-in module, and ultimately aims to become the protocol standard for fair issue-sourcing and community-aligned innovation at scale.

Compass uses Next.js 15 and React 18 with TypeScript for the frontend, styled with Tailwind CSS and shadcn/ui (built on Radix UI). Forms are managed with React Hook Form and validated using Zod. User-submitted problems are stored in local storage. The app integrates OpenAI GPT-4 via an API route to generate project ideas, using prompt engineering for structured responses. Email verification is simulated in the UI and set up for future integration with Vlayer. The codebase uses ESLint and Prettier for linting and formatting, and is deployed on Vercel. Performance is improved with Next.js image optimization and Tailwind CSS purging. Throughout development, Cursor AI was used as a copilot for writing, refactoring, and debugging code, accelerating iteration and ensuring code quality. All features and dependencies mentioned are present in the codebase.