This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass
🌿 What We Built
We built Touch Grass: Community Swap-Meet & Local Event Matchmaker (Comm-Swap)—an open-source, 100% offline-first web application designed to break people out of endless screen doomscrolling and connect neighbors for real-world physical item and skill barters in public outdoor spaces (community gardens, park gazebos, and library courtyards).
Instead of relying on corporate cloud servers, telemetry trackers, and commercial shipping, Comm-Swap empowers neighborhoods to run their own local barter networks completely self-hosted, offline, and private.
🔗 Code Repository
- GitHub: https://github.com/AbhavyaManchanda/community-swap
- License: Open-Source MIT
🌻 How It Fits the "Touch Grass" Theme
Modern social networks and e-commerce platforms maximize screen addiction, corporate data mining, and disposable consumption. We asked: What if technology actively encouraged you to close your laptop, walk outside, and talk to your actual neighbors?
- In-Person Exchange in Daylight: Every trade is matched with a recommended outdoor, open-air public venue (e.g. Sunny Creek Community Garden by the Sunflower Patch, Riverside Bikeway Gazebo, Oak Grove Library Courtyard).
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The Printable Offline "Swap Pass":
Rather than keeping neighbors tethered to mobile screens at the meetup, Comm-Swap generates a clean, tactile Printable Swap Pass featuring:
- A perforated cut-line stub with unique offline verification code.
- Exact daylight meetup instructions and landmark notes.
- An offline etiquette checklist (test gear on the grass, confirm handshakes, pack out all trash).
- Physical signature blocks for neighbors to verify the barter hand-to-hand without any digital tracking.
⚡ The Multi-Way Barter Loop Engine (A → B → C → A)
Traditional direct barter ($A \leftrightarrow B$) suffers from the "double coincidence of wants"—Neighbor A rarely has exactly what Neighbor B wants.
Comm-Swap solves this by constructing a directed barter graph and using cycle detection algorithms to discover multi-way trade rings:
- Maya (Urban Gardener) offers Heirloom Sourdough Starter & Proofing Basket; wants Garden Shovel & Hand Pruners.
- Carlos (Bike Mechanic) offers Heavy Duty Garden Shovel & Pruners; wants 2-Person Camping Tent.
- Aisha (Camper & Reader) offers REI 2-Person Backpacking Tent; wants Artisan Sourdough Starter.
Result: Our engine detects a closed 3-way circular loop:
$$\text{Maya} \xrightarrow{\text{Sourdough}} \text{Aisha} \xrightarrow{\text{Tent}} \text{Carlos} \xrightarrow{\text{Shovel}} \text{Maya}$$
Everyone receives what they need in a single community swap session!
🧠 Local Open-Source AI & Zero-Cloud Privacy Guarantee
To ensure total privacy and independence from cloud infrastructure:
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Local Neural Semantic Engine: Uses
sentence-transformers(all-MiniLM-L6-v2) to compute semantic similarity between offers and desires, supported by a fast stem-aware token vectorizer fallback. This enables intelligent semantic matching (e.g., matching "Bicycle tune-up" with "Commuter bike brake repair") without sending a single byte to external corporate APIs. -
100% Local SQLite Database: All listings, neighborhood user profiles, and meetup locations are persisted locally in
comm_swap.db. - Zero Telemetry / Zero Big Tech Ads: The entire stack runs on a neighborhood laptop, local mesh network, or Raspberry Pi.
🛠️ Tech Stack
- Backend: FastAPI, Python, SQLite, NetworkX, Scikit-Learn / Sentence-Transformers
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Frontend: React 18, Tailwind CSS, Vite, Lucide-react, custom
@media printprint engine - Architecture: Offline-first, Zero-cloud, RESTful API
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