A one-day hackathon project at the Claude Impact Lab (Melbourne, May 2026). The brief was open. I built MESH — Melbourne Exchange & Solidarity Hub — a gamified civic platform where residents see their suburb as a node in a network and AI agents read live open data to suggest the most useful thing the community can do next. 1. Why MESH Every Australian suburb is sitting on quiet abundance. Gardens that produce too much. Retirees who could teach welding. Neighbours who’d happily check on each other in a heatwave if anyone asked. The capacity exists. The wiring doesn’t. Three observations led me to MESH: Civic capacity is fragmented. There’s no shared map of who can teach what, who has spare zucchini, who’s ready in a heatwave. The information lives in group chats, in heads, in council PDFs nobody reads. Open data is inert. data.melbourne.vic.gov.au alone publishes 239 datasets. Almost none of them inform a decision a resident will make this week. The data isn’t missing — the loop is.…