Gabriel Solomon (Offset Works)
There's so much happening in any city on any given weekend — protests, town halls, mutual aid runs, free concerts, volunteer cleanups.
Core trick
A vision model reads bilingual flyer images into structured event records, then merges duplicates across sources with a stated reason for each match.
Description
There's so much happening in any city on any given weekend — protests, town halls, mutual aid runs, free concerts, volunteer cleanups. And most people miss most of it. Not because they don't care. Because the information is everywhere and nowhere: split across Instagram, Telegram, Eventbrite, city websites, neighborhood listservs, and handmade flyers on telephone poles.
Convoca is my attempt to fix that. It's an open-source platform that uses seven Claude agents working together to find, read, deduplicate, and surface community events in real time — across sources no single person has time to monitor.
The agents parse what you're actually asking for, pull from dozens of public feeds, extract structured events from bilingual flyers using vision, and merge duplicates across platforms — showing exactly why two posts are the same event. Every result comes with a plain-language reason for why it was recommended to you.
But it's not just search. You can save events, have the agent build a Saturday itinerary around your causes, and get email reminders before things you care about. If you're on the ground and see something, you can submit a real-time safety flag — police presence, route change, medical aid station — and it goes through an AI review and onto the map in seconds.
The whole thing streams its reasoning live. You watch the agents work. Every decision has a visible explanation. I wanted people to feel like the agent is working for them — not just returning results, but showing its thinking so they can trust it.
Three rules I didn't bend on: public sources only, no user profiling, and the community is the main input channel. One tap to submit a flyer. The vision agent does the rest.
It works for any city. Add your sources, point it at your community, ship it. The infrastructure is there. The organizing doesn't have to start from zero.
README excerpt
# Convoca **Civic and community life generates hundreds of organized events every weekend. Most people who care hear about 5% of them.** Convoca is an open-source, agent-powered discovery layer that pulls from every public source — RSS feeds, city APIs, Telegram channels, community-submitted flyers — and makes the full picture visible, searchable, and actionable in one place. Built with Claude Opus 4.7 for the Anthropic hackathon. Launching in NYC and Guatemala City. --- ## What it does ### 1. Vision on real-world bilingual flyers Drag a screenshot from Instagram, a photo of a church bulletin board, a WhatsApp-forwarded flyer. The vision agent reads it — title, date, location, organizer, action type, cause tags, language — and pins it on the map within seconds. Confidence score included. No manual data entry. ### 2. Cross-source semantic dedup with visible reasoning The same Saturday food distribution gets posted by five organizations: different platforms, different wording, different times listed. The dedup agent merges them into one canonical event and shows its work — which signals it weighted, why the datetime discrepancy didn't block the merge, what confidence it landed at. This judgment is only possible with a reasoning model, and you can watch it happen live. ### 3. One-tap action + community submit loop From discovery to signup is one tap — deep-linked to the organizer's existing Mobilize or Action Network form, no Convoca account required. Attendees in the fie