Con-pass

Inspiration

Living in a vibrant place like New York City and Long Island, we noticed a frustrating paradox: despite being surrounded by incredible culture, there is a massive hyper-local disconnect. Niche arts performances, community-driven solutions, and local food festivals often get buried on massive event platforms. Furthermore, coordinating group attendance creates social friction, and crucial accessibility data (like stair-free routes or elevator access) is almost always missing. We wanted to design a platform that doesn't just list events, but actively breaks down the logistical and social barriers to experiencing neighborhood culture.

What it does

Con-pass is a map-first cultural companion conceptualized to bridge the gap between local events and community connection.

Geospatial Discovery: Users set a local radius to discover hyper-local events with deep cultural filters (e.g., filtering "Food" down to "Plant-based" or "Caribbean").

Diversity in Action: The design features multilingual support tools and highlights immigrant-owned businesses.

Verified Hangout Lobbies: To solve social friction, users with verified IDs can unlock digital lobbies for specific events to see who else is going, chat, and coordinate a meetup.

Real-Time Transit & Accessibility: The UI includes a custom transit dashboard mapping out live schedules, route optimization, and venue-specific accessibility heatmaps (restrooms, elevators, etc.).

How we built it

We focused our weekend heavily on product design, user experience, and systems architecture. We built a comprehensive, interactive high-fidelity prototype to demonstrate the exact user flow.

For the frontend, we designed the UI utilizing a custom "Community Roots" color palette (warm earthy tones like terracotta and olive green) to emphasize our community-driven mission while maintaining strict WCAG accessibility standards.

For the backend, rather than writing deployment scripts, we engineered a complete, scalable serverless cloud architecture blueprint. We mapped out exactly how the app will function, planning the integrations for Mapbox (for advanced GIS mapping), AWS Lambda & DynamoDB (for state management and secure lobbies), AWS Bedrock (for AI-driven translations), and live MTA/LIRR transit feeds.

Challenges we ran into

While we initially aimed to build a fully functional application, we quickly realized that developing a cross-platform mobile app from scratch with limited coding experience was a massive hurdle for a single weekend. We faced a critical decision and chose to pivot. Instead of getting bogged down in syntax errors or broken environments, we channeled our energy into what mattered most: creating a flawless user experience, a deep-dive interactive prototype, and a robust, fully documented technical blueprint for future development.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are incredibly proud of our ability to pivot under pressure and deliver a comprehensive, high-fidelity prototype. We successfully mapped out a highly technical AWS and Mapbox backend architecture without letting the lack of immediate coding experience stop us from solving a complex problem. More importantly, we are proud to have designed a conceptual tool that treats accessibility and cultural diversity as core infrastructure rather than optional add-ons.

What we learned

This project pushed us to deeply understand product management, rapid prototyping, and UI/UX design principles. We also gained an incredible amount of conceptual knowledge regarding how advanced spatial data (GIS), real-time transit APIs, and serverless cloud architectures function together, giving us a clear, actionable roadmap for how apps are built in the real world.

What's next for Con-pass

Our immediate next step is taking the time to learn the React Native and AWS skills required to transition our high-fidelity prototype into a live, coded application. Long-term, we plan to partner directly with local immigrant support organizations to populate our "Diversity in Action" resource layers, expanding our localized data networks across the entirety of Long Island and the NYC metro area.

Built With

• canva
• figma