title: HearthNet
emoji: 🐢
colorFrom: purple
colorTo: pink
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 6.16.0
python_version: '3.12'
app_file: app.py
pinned: true
short_description: Community-Owned AI That Works Even When The Internet Doesn't
🔥 HearthNet
Community-Owned AI That Works Even When The Internet Doesn't
🌐 Local-First AI • 🤝 Community-Powered • 🛡️ Resilient by Design • ⚡ Offline-Capable
🚨 The Problem
Today's AI depends on centralized cloud infrastructure.
When the internet goes down, so does access to:
- 🤖 AI assistants
- 📚 Knowledge bases
- 💬 Communication platforms
- 🛒 Marketplaces
- 🗺️ Navigation and local information
Whether caused by outages, disasters, censorship, infrastructure failures, or simply poor connectivity, modern communities become digitally isolated almost instantly.
What if AI could continue working anyway?
🔥 Introducing HearthNet
HearthNet transforms the computers already around you into a resilient local AI network.
Your gaming PC.
Your neighbor's old laptop.
A Raspberry Pi in a community center.
An unused workstation in a local business.
Together, they become a shared AI cooperative.
No centralized server required.
No cloud dependency required.
No single point of failure.
🎬 Imagine This Scenario
A storm damages the internet connection for an entire neighborhood.
Most online services become unavailable.
With HearthNet:
✅ AI assistants still answer questions
✅ Local document search continues working
✅ Emergency information remains available
✅ Community chat stays online
✅ Local marketplaces continue operating
✅ Knowledge remains accessible
The internet disappears.
The community does not.
⚡ Key Features
🤖 Distributed AI Inference
Every node advertises its capabilities.
A gaming PC might offer:
- Large Language Models
- Vision Models
- Embeddings
A Raspberry Pi might offer:
- Message relaying
- Local storage
- Discovery services
Requests are automatically routed to the most suitable node.
📚 Local Knowledge (RAG)
HearthNet can host community knowledge libraries including:
- First aid manuals
- Emergency procedures
- Community resources
- Local guides
- Educational content
Even completely offline.
🌐 Automatic Discovery
No manual configuration.
No IP addresses.
No complex setup.
Open HearthNet and nearby nodes automatically discover each other.
🛡️ Internet-Outage Resilience
When the internet is available:
Community ↔ Internet ↔ Cloud Services
When the internet disappears:
Community ↔ Community ↔ Community
HearthNet automatically switches to local-first operation.
💬 Local Community Communication
Communities can communicate directly through:
- Chat
- Announcements
- Local messaging
- Shared information boards
No external servers required.
🛒 Community Marketplace
Buy.
Sell.
Trade.
Share resources.
Even during connectivity disruptions.
🏗️ Architecture
┌───────────────────────────┐
│ Frontend │
└─────────────┬─────────────┘
│
▼
┌───────────────────────────┐
│ Capability Bus │
└─────────────┬─────────────┘
│
┌──────────┼──────────┐
▼ ▼ ▼
┌────────┐ ┌────────┐ ┌────────┐
│ LLM │ │ RAG │ │ Chat │
│ Node │ │ Node │ │ Node │
└────────┘ └────────┘ └────────┘
▲ ▲ ▲
┌────────┐ ┌────────┐ ┌────────┐
│Laptop A│ │Laptop B│ │Pi Zero │
└────────┘ └────────┘ └────────┘
🚀 Hackathon Goals
Our hackathon MVP demonstrates:
Phase 1
- Node discovery
- Capability registration
- Local AI inference
- Knowledge retrieval
- Offline operation
Phase 2
- Local marketplace
- Community messaging
- Health monitoring
- Distributed storage
Phase 3
- Long-distance mesh networking
- Federated communities
- Distributed inference
- Federated learning
🧠 Why This Matters
AI is rapidly becoming essential infrastructure.
Today, that infrastructure is mostly controlled by a handful of organizations.
HearthNet explores a different future:
A future where communities own and operate AI together.
A future where knowledge remains available during outages.
A future where local resilience is built directly into our digital systems.
🌍 Potential Use Cases
🚑 Emergency Response
Access critical information when external services are unavailable.
🏫 Schools
Run local educational AI systems without constant cloud access.
🌾 Rural Communities
Provide AI services in areas with limited connectivity.
🎪 Events & Festivals
Create temporary local AI networks for attendees.
🏘️ Neighborhoods
Community knowledge sharing and local services.
🛠️ Technology Stack
AI
- llama.cpp
- Ollama
- Hugging Face Models
- Sentence Transformers
Backend
- Python
- FastAPI
- WebSockets
Knowledge Layer
- ChromaDB
- FAISS
- Local Embeddings
Infrastructure
- Docker
- Docker Compose
Frontend
- Gradio / Web UI
👥 Team
Built during the Hugging Face Hackathon ❤️
We believe that the future of AI should be:
✅ Open
✅ Local
✅ Resilient
✅ Community-Owned
🤝 Join Us
We're actively looking for:
- AI Engineers
- Distributed Systems Developers
- Frontend Developers
- DevOps Engineers
- Designers
- Community Builders
Ideas, feedback, contributions, and discussions are always welcome.
🌟 Vision
"The cloud owns AI today.
HearthNet is our bet that communities will own it tomorrow."
Built with ❤️, ☕, open source, and a slightly unreasonable belief that neighborhoods should have their own AI.