Signal Over Noise #03
May 23rd, 2025
Dear Reader,
This week I’ve been immersed in the exhilarating chaos of Hack the Future – a 48-hour climate resilience hackathon in Tallinn, Estonia. Organised by Garage48, Latitude59, and the Estonian Ministry of Climate, it brought together teams from across Europe to design real-world solutions for specific locations facing climate challenges. For me and my team, that place was Valencia, Spain–and I’m thrilled to share that we came away with a second-place win.
Myself, James and Maya as the Remote Resilience Hub winning team, with the jury on stage in Tallinn.
Photo credit: Sandra Susi
The Challenge: Digital Nomad Paradise… With Asterisks
Valencia markets itself as the ideal digital nomad destination: sunny, affordable, vibrant. And while the marketing isn’t wrong, there’s a significant gap between the weekend visitor experience and actually trying to build a life here.
Anyone who’s attempted to settle in Valencia quickly encounters a labyrinth of questions:
- How do you navigate the byzantine autónomo (self-employment) registration process?
- What exactly is empadronamiento, and why do you need this local council registration?
- Why does every rental contract read like it was deliberately designed to confuse?
- Where can non-Spanish speakers find reliable support during emergencies like the recent floods and country-wide blackout?
The information exists, but it’s fragmented across platforms, buried in outdated websites, or written in impenetrable bureaucratic language. When crisis hits (whether personal or city-wide), this information gap becomes more than an inconvenience – it’s a resilience problem.
Our Solution: The Remote Resilience Hub
We created the beginnings of something practical: a lightweight digital support system to help people and companies get “remote-ready” and navigate Valencia’s paperwork maze with confidence.
Our solution has four interconnected components:
- Location-aware resource guide: Curated, human-verified practical support resources
- Mesh network fallback: Using Meshtastic for communication when internet infrastructure fails
- Context-aware chat assistant: Personalised guidance on what to do next and where to go
- Localised knowledge base: Valencia-specific information verified by people who actually live there
It’s not polished–we built it in 48 sleep-deprived hours! 🤪–but it’s already a functioning prototype that addresses a genuine need.
The Tech Behind It
We combined several powerful low-code tools to make this work:
- AppBudo: For rapid mobile-ready app prototyping
- Pickaxe: To build agents with memory and contextual awareness
- Make.com: For seamless integration between components
- Perplexity Pro & Google Search: For supplemental information retrieval
- GPT 4.0: Our main agent model (after some interesting challenges)
- Custom knowledge base: 40+ hand-curated and verified local resources
Learning Through Failure
Early testing revealed some entertaining problems. When asked “How do I register as an autónomo?”, our initial assistant confidently provided instructions on importing cars! 🚘
It turned out our first model (ChatGPT o4-mini) was confusing “autónomo” with “automobile”. In another demo, a question about importing a license returned similar information about pet importation procedures, confused over pet licenses and driver’s licenses.
These failures led to crucial improvements. We rewrote our prompts with specific filters and exclusions, prioritised our verified knowledge base over external search, and ultimately upgraded to GPT 4.0 for better language handling. The cost increased slightly, but the accuracy improvement was worth it.
This reinforced an important lesson: AI needs thoughtful boundaries, especially when navigating multiple languages and cultural contexts. It needs people behind it to check, verify and check again. You can’t blindly stick an AI interface on all the things and expect it to not screw up.
Why This Matters
Rather than just conceptualising a solution, we built a working prototype–and it resonated with the jury. Our second-place finish earned us an invitation to pitch at the VDS Tech Festival (Valencia Digital Summit) in October.
But what I’m most proud of is creating something genuinely useful with my co-founders Maya Middlemiss and James Leonard. Our current solution already saves users approximately 8 hours of frustration through carefully curated resources and intelligent guidance–time that could be spent enjoying Valencia instead of drowning in paperwork.
We now have momentum to develop this further, collaborating with local institutions and community groups to scale it across the city. This isn’t just about convenience; it’s about making digital resilience tangible and accessible for everyone who calls Valencia home–whether for a month or a lifetime.
As we refine our prototype with more testing and user feedback, I’m excited to see how this project evolves from a hackathon idea into a resource that strengthens community resilience where it matters most.
Thanks for reading, as always.
Until next week,
Jim
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Made with ❤️ in Valencia by Jim Christian. For feedback, please reach out to [email protected].
