Signal Over Noise (formerly The AI Download) is your weekly guide to navigating the rapidly evolving world of AI and digital technology. Written by Jim Christian, a digital strategy consultant and former tech educator, this newsletter cuts through the noise to deliver practical insights and actionable strategies. Each week, you’ll get behind-the-scenes access to real-world experiments with cutting-edge AI tools, automation strategies, and emerging technologies.
Share
Digital Resilience: From Concept to Award-Winner in 48 Hours
Published 21 days ago • 3 min read
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The information exists, but it’s fragmented across platforms, buried in outdated websites, or written in impenetrable bureaucratic language.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:
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
Ready to Master Your AI Workflow?
Feeling overwhelmed by the endless AI options? I can help you find the perfect mix for your needs. Book a 90-minute AI Strategy Session and discover your ideal setup.
Signal Over Noise (formerly The AI Download) is your weekly guide to navigating the rapidly evolving world of AI and digital technology. Written by Jim Christian, a digital strategy consultant and former tech educator, this newsletter cuts through the noise to deliver practical insights and actionable strategies. Each week, you’ll get behind-the-scenes access to real-world experiments with cutting-edge AI tools, automation strategies, and emerging technologies.
Signal Over Noise #06 June 13th, 2025 This Week: A Practical Framework for Writing Better AI Prompts Dear Reader, Most AI prompts fail before they even begin. Not because you don’t know what you want—but because the AI doesn’t. When people say “It gave me something weird” or “That’s not quite what I meant,” what they’re often running into isn’t a model problem. It’s a context problem. Enter: The PAST Framework This is something I developed not because I needed something new, but because I...
Signal Over Noise #05 June 6th, 2025 Dear Reader, Here's a real-world case study where AI orchestration saved £47,000 and transformed a content nightmare into a strategic asset. The Problem That Landed on My Desk A colleague reached out with a particular headache: their company was drowning in content. Some 3,000 articles published over the course of 15 years. Some of it brilliant, some outdated, most somewhere in between. Their customers couldn’t find current information. Their SEO was...
Signal Over Noise #04 May 30th, 2025 Dear Reader, I’ve been putting Claude Sonnet 4 through its paces this week, and whilst the improved reasoning is impressive, what really caught my attention is how it’s fundamentally changed where I work. For the first time, I'm experiencing true AI orchestration—where my AI assistant can work across multiple tools and data sources simultaneously, rather than being trapped in individual apps. The difference is transformational. The Orchestration Revolution...
