My friends and I designed and built a localised peer reviewed news site in 2 days. It allows for people to post news or community posts, similar to a grapevine, but all posts have a location, and only people within a set radius can vote on the post, stating if the news is true or not. This allows for a peer reviewed system that is far less likely to get votes from people who are not there, as to vote, you need to be within the radius of the post.

The theme of the hackathon was: A solar flare has hit and wiped all records, how can you make sure people are who they say they are and that information is true? We decided to focus on the latter half of the theme and create a platform that can self regulate news, ensuring that only people who saw it, or were affected by it, are able to vote.

The Code

As per usual for these hackathons, we used claude and codex to do bulk of the coding, fixing mistakes myself when the model messed up. We also needed a database to hold all the posts and users so they could be accessed from the website, for this I chose to use postgreSQL as I was familiar with it. I don't fully trust llm's to modify databases for me so all the database stuff was done the old fashioned way, with me creating the tables myself.

We hosted the website on my friends server, using CapRover to deploy the code straight from Github. The database and the site were on separate docker containers inside CapRover, connected with a virtual network so no outside access can be made to the database.

The frontend of the website was made with Svelte for the interface, with OpenStreetMap for the map on the home page. Initially we had some issues with contrast on the map, as we wanted to have a simple map, instead of one with all the normal map information on it (like street names and place names). Initally the map was a light green with a light blue background, however we found that it was quite hard to read, especially on screens that were lower contrast to begin with (mainly lower end or older screens). I modifed the map to use a darker green that had more contrast to the blue background which made it much easier to view.

Design

We wanted the interface to be as intuitive as possible, with the main interface being map interaction. This was a rather novel way of interacting, as the posts are pined to a location on the map, rather than in a list by default. There is a trending / latest drop down that shows by default, pointing to the location of the latest posts. This allows people to easily see and interact with them.

The top menu bar allows people to switch between national and local, with local being the default if location permission is granted when the site is accessed. profiles are shown on the right with the new post button.

When a new post is made, the poster gets to choose the "radius of impact" only people within that radius are allowed to vote on posts. Posts can either be news or a community post, with both allowed to have up to 6 images and 1000 words.

My team and I had a great weekend making a product that people could actually use, we didn't win anything but had loads of fun making it.

Download the source on github: https://github.com/AustinMayGithub/GDGC2026