The network that is already there.
A dual-use civic mesh for cities. In peacetime it is a hyperlocal, identity-verified resource-sharing network: borrow a drill, get sour cream from the neighbour instead of driving to the shop, hand over a parking spot. When mobile networks or power fail, the same network switches into a resilient emergency mode: phones and home routers relay signed emergency requests (AED, EpiPen, fire, first aid) and official alerts hop-by-hop, without any backbone.
Built for HackYeah 2026, Open Task: SMART CITY.
A city already owns almost everything it needs; it is just in the wrong pocket. A drill is used for 13 minutes in its lifetime, an AED hangs on a wall 80 metres from a cardiac arrest. Pomóc does not create resources, it creates the route between a need and a resource, through the people and devices physically around you. Every participant is a node in a proximity graph; routers are the static backbone, phones are the mobile edge. The same graph, the same identities and the same protocol serve two very different days: the ordinary Tuesday and the day the network goes dark.
| Peace mode | Emergency mode | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Waste reduction, utilisation, neighbourhood efficiency | Resilient communication and life-critical resource routing |
| Request classes | Lend / borrow / give, local questions | Life-critical, safety, official alerts, "I am OK" check-ins, sealed casualty reports, local info (off at L3) |
| Fees | Free by default; a lender may ask a fee for a loan, settled directly between the two people | Disabled |
| Reach | Hop-limited (local by design) | Hop limit raised, store-and-forward enabled |
| Transport | Mesh between neighbours; internet only to reach the Authority | Router mesh, then phone-only degraded mesh |
| Trigger | Default | Local backhaul loss, or signed local authority declaration |
- Citizen: registered with address and ID, holds a device key pair, can request and offer.
- Router / relay node: ISP-managed CPE bound to a verified customer, relays only, cannot act.
- Authority: issues citizen certificates, signs emergency declarations and official alerts.
- ISP: provisions relay capability on routers remotely (existing TR-069 / TR-369 channel), unpaid, as required by regulation.
- Gateway: a node with backhaul (satellite, municipal fibre) bridging mesh islands to the authority.
Funding. Pomóc is government-legalised, nonprofit software. ISPs receive no payment and sign no commercial contract. The only infrastructure cost is the gateway servers, which the governing body has to maintain anyway as its communication hubs.
Nothing of the production system is built at the hackathon. The deliverable is an interactive simulation that shows the protocol and both operating modes on a city-scale graph (routers as static nodes, phones as mobile nodes), including mode switching, controlled flooding with hop limits, TTL and de-duplication, and store-and-forward via moving people. Coverage planning for the city is part of the vision, not of the simulation. Cryptography is standard and not simulated; the simulation is about mesh behaviour. Also not modelled: topology gossip (links come from device positions and radio range), per-sender rate limits, AED / resource matching, casualty reports and the router captive portal.
Beyond the hackathon deliverable, apps/prototype holds a partly built
prototype of the protocol and services: Go services running as containers on one machine, with real
signatures, and the start of a Kotlin phone SDK. Its README says what works today and what is left.
The hackathon deliverable is a browser-only simulation of the protocol on a district graph.
It lives in apps/sim (Vite, React, Mantine) on top of packages/core (the pure TypeScript
protocol engine, unit-tested, no UI dependencies). Cryptography is stubbed: trust is a
boolean on each message's signer, so forged messages are still computed as rejected.
pnpm install
pnpm dev # http://localhost:5173
pnpm test # engine + sim pure-module tests (vitest)
pnpm typecheck # tsc for both packages
pnpm check # biome lint + format
pnpm build # static bundle in apps/sim/dist (works offline, relative base)The demo opens already playing, in real time: a tick is 200 ms of simulated time and takes 200 ms at 1×; 10× and 60× compress ten minutes into one or six. Protocol timers are shortened for the stage: losing the cells triggers L1 after 1 s instead of 10 min, declarations last 60 s and message TTLs are 24–60 s, so every effect shows within a minute. Configure the world in the left panel (phones, routers, gateways, radio ranges, seed, phones on the move) and press Generate. Reset rebuilds the same seed, so a rehearsed run replays exactly.
The default seed 42 loads Kraków: about 2.2 × 1.3 km around the Vistula bend (Kazimierz, Stradom, Stare Podgórze, Dębniki, Grzegórzki, Zabłocie), traced from a street map into a street graph with parks and the river. Nothing stands in the Vistula: phones start on streets, gateways on the most central street junctions (the first on the network's central hub, the others at least 400 m apart), routers anywhere outside the river and the parks (in the blocks between the streets). A phone or gateway moved into the water lands on the nearest street, a router moved into the water or a park on the nearest allowed spot, and only the bridges cross the river. With Phones on the move on (the default), at every moment 10% of the phones walk (2–3 km/h), 5% cycle (10 km/h) and 10% drive (50 km/h). Each traveller follows the shortest street route to a destination (walks 120–600 m, sometimes into a park and back; rides 300–1500 m; drives 500–2000 m), stops and lingers there for 30 s to 5 min, then sets off again on foot, by bike or by car, whichever is short of people, or stays put for good while someone else sets off. Everyone else stays still. In an emergency mode every phone and router that receives a message keeps a copy for five simulated minutes and hands it to anyone who comes into range without it (walkers, cyclists and drivers carry it between islands); only then is the copy dropped. Any other seed draws a procedural district of the configured size. Click any device, or the Authority badge, to inspect its inbox, store-and-forward buffer and log, and to act from it (send a request, accept one, check in, declare a level, broadcast an alert, cut power). A lime badge on a phone counts the requests it currently sees as open.
| Key | Event |
|---|---|
c |
Mobile network (cells) up / down |
g |
Power grid on / off: routers without battery backup go dark |
1 2 3 |
Authority declares L1 Disruption / L2 Disaster / L3 Security (regions via the Authority inspector) |
0 |
Authority all-clear (L3 steps down through L1, never straight to peace) |
a |
Authority broadcasts an official alert |
r |
A random citizen sends a request allowed in its current mode |
x |
The nearest eligible citizen accepts the oldest open request |
f |
An unregistered phone sends a forged request; every neighbour drops it |
space . + - |
Play / pause, single step, speed |
v t h d Esc |
Range circles, topology packets, fit view, dark / light, deselect |
Packets move one hop per tick, so the flood, the response travelling back along the recorded path, store-and-forward across islands and the hop-limit edge are all visible on the map.
- Concept: vision, actors, trust model, modes, economics.
- Functional requirements
- Non-functional requirements
- Prior art and related initiatives
- Diagrams: system overview, trust model, mode state machine, degradation ladder, AED scenario, forwarding logic
Concept, research, documentation and the simulation code were made with AI assistance (Claude Code); the title illustration was generated with Gemini. External sources are cited in docs/prior-art.md.