This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady

🦥 TL;DR. Paste a week of volunteer chat messages. Gemma 4, running locally in Ollama, copies the words that matter ("Tuesday", "after 3", "if my work shift gets moved"). Plain Python turns them into dates, times and a day-by-day history. You accept or reject each suggestion beside the message it came from, and only what you accept reaches the final sheet.

▶️ 5:48 demo · 🧪 Try the replay in your browser · 💻 Code, MIT licence

Thursday, 9:10 a.m.

On Monday, Maria posts in the volunteer group chat:

I can do Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

On Thursday she posts again:

Change of plans — Thursday doesn't work anymore, sorry! Tuesday morning still good. I can add Friday 2-5.

There are 48 more messages that week. Priya can do "Monday after 3". Kofi "might be able to do Thursday afternoon if my work shift gets moved". Rui writes "Next Tuesday" on a Monday, which could mean tomorrow or the Tuesday after. Somebody has to read all of it, remember who changed their mind, and type it into a sheet. Then somebody changes their mind again.

Riverside Community Pantry doesn't exist. The pantry, its 18 volunteers and all 50 messages are invented, so this could be built and tested without touching anyone's real chat. But if you've ever coordinated volunteers, you've lived this week.

What I Built

Availazy is a local review tool for the person who asks "when can you help?" and then has to make sense of the answers.

Availazy turns volunteer messages into suggestions you can review beside their source.

You paste dated chat messages (or a WhatsApp text export) and your volunteer list, pick the week, and Availazy:

• 📝 suggests availability records, each shown beside its message with the quoted words highlighted;
• 🔁 keeps everyone's history day by day, so a correction replaces the earlier answer, a cancellation removes it, and a "maybe" stays a maybe until the person confirms;
• ✋ refuses to guess. Anything the words don't settle goes on a Needs a decision list;
• ✅ exports a final sheet built only from what you accepted. It says complete only when every message is marked reviewed, nothing is pending and nothing is unresolved. Otherwise it says provisional, and it still downloads.

It records availability, not shift assignments. The person who gets to be lazy is the coordinator: they stop retyping and start deciding.

Demo

For readable interface details, select ⚙️ → Quality → 1080p HD.

The video opens with the local app: Gemma 4 reads two invented messages live, through Ollama, on my laptop. Then it switches to the hosted replay for the full week.

Try it yourself: https://availability-ledger-replay.onrender.com/app. This is a replay, not live inference. It serves the fictional week with Gemma's answers saved in advance, so it runs on free hosting without a model. Reviewing, history, the chart and both exports all work; pasting your own messages is switched off. Free hosting sleeps when idle, so the first visit can take about a minute.

There's also an illustrated guide with diagrams at /docs.

Gemma missed Maria's cancellation. That's the point.

When Gemma read Maria's Thursday message in the saved run, it got her Tuesday right and her new Friday right, and it missed the cancellation completely.

So Availazy doesn't trust one reader. In the default mode, a plain keyword reader reads every message alongside the model. When the rules see a cancellation the model didn't, the app adds it, flagged, so I can check it:

Gemma found Tuesday and Friday. The rules added the Thursday cancellation for review.

Until I accept it, the sheet shows Thursday as a pending change. One click on Accept and Thursday is gone from the final sheet. In Model only mode, the same replay leaves Maria on Thursday morning. That one message is the whole argument for running two readers.

How I Built It: the model reads, code decides

The design is one strict split:

message ──▶ Gemma 4 E2B (Ollama, local) ──▶ copied words + a proposed status
        └─▶ keyword rules ─────────────────▶ a second opinion
                         │
                         ▼
     Python: who, which date, which hours, does the quote exist,
             what does this replace, what is still unsure
                         │
                         ▼
     You: accept / reject / edit, mark each message reviewed
                         │
                         ▼
     Final sheet (accepted records only) + review log

1. Gemma copies words; it doesn't do dates. For each message, Gemma fills a JSON schema that Ollama enforces. This is its real saved answer for Maria's "Tuesday morning still good":

{"person": "SENDER", "day_text": "Tuesday", "time_text": "morning",
 "status": "available", "condition": "", "replaces_earlier": false,
 "excerpt": "Tuesday morning still good"}

No date and no hours, just the words. Gemma didn't even mark it as a replacement ("replaces_earlier": false). Python spotted "Change of plans" and marked Maria's new answers as replacing her old ones, with a visible note on each card. Python also works out that "Tuesday", sent on Thursday 5 November for the week of 9 November, means 10 November, and that "morning" means a fixed window:

DEFAULT_PERIODS = {
    "morning": ("09:00", "12:00"),
    "afternoon": ("13:00", "17:00"),
    "evening": ("17:00", "20:00"),
}

Open ranges are code too. "After 3" runs to 20:00, the end of the planning day, and the card says so:

“After 3” becomes 15:00–20:00, with the assumption written on the card.

2. Every quote is checked against the message. If the model's quote and its day/time words are both missing from the message, the suggestion is not applied unless you choose "Use it anyway". If only some words are missing, it's flagged.

3. History is kept in order. Later messages change only the days and times they mention. Kofi's "if my work shift gets moved" stays conditional until his later "my shift got moved, so Thursday afternoon is a yes". Olu's "I have to drop out for the rest of this week", sent on a Wednesday, cancels Wednesday through Sunday, taking out his Thursday evening and Saturday morning:

An excerpt of the change history, with replacements and cancellations linked to their source messages.

4. When the words don't settle it, it asks. "Next Tuesday" sent on a Monday could be two dates. "This Saturday" sent the week before is outside the week. A name that matches nobody on the roster isn't guessed:

Ambiguous dates, unmatched names and unresolved conditions stay on the decision list.

5. The calm wrong answer. Marta asks: "Is Maria still doing Tuesday morning? If not I can take it." Gemma filed Marta's offer under Maria, as a conditional Tuesday. It's wrong, and it looks perfectly reasonable. That's why every suggestion sits beside its message, and why this one carries "Only one of the two readers found this":

Marta wrote the message, but Gemma assigned the offer to Maria. Reviewing the source makes the mistake visible.

One click on Reject and Maria's Tuesday is firm again.

Update, 24 Oct: after a reader's comment, Availazy now also warns when a suggestion is for someone other than the sender, or when the message names another volunteer. Both warnings block one-click accept, so it now takes 36 suggestions instead of the 39 shown in the video.

6. Only accepted records reach the sheet. Here are the first rows of the real export from the replay, after I accepted Maria's cancellation, rejected the m48 mix-up, accepted the 36 warning-free suggestions and marked two messages reviewed:

# availability-final v1; week=2026-11-09; status=provisional; unreviewed=m01 m03 … m50; pending=24; blocking_issues=0
volunteer,date,start,end,status,condition,cell_state,sources
Maria Lopez,2026-11-10,09:00,12:00,available,,confirmed,m28.1
Maria Lopez,2026-11-13,14:00,17:00,available,,confirmed,m28.2
Marta Lopes,2026-11-09,09:00,12:00,available,,needs_review,m17.1

(The unreviewed list is shortened here.) Maria has Tuesday and Friday, and no Thursday. Her messages are marked reviewed, so her cells are confirmed. Everyone else is needs_review, and the whole file honestly says provisional.

The stack is boring on purpose: a Python standard-library server, plain HTML/CSS/JS with no framework or CDN, and Ollama on 127.0.0.1. The only optional dependency is sentry-sdk, for opt-in tracing.

The Lazy Payoff 🦥

Here's the fictional week, by the numbers, from the replay:

After the one-click accept: dark green is accepted, light green still waits for review, striped orange is conditional.

So the work shifts from reading 50 messages and typing a sheet to checking 31 flagged suggestions, each with its quote right next to it. The model reads the whole week in about two minutes: long enough to make a cup of tea.

I haven't timed a real coordinator, so I won't claim minutes saved. The repo has a written protocol for that study; it hasn't been run.

How well does it work?

I didn't want to grade my own homework, so a separate ChatGPT session wrote a test week I'd never seen (set C: 24 fictional messages; I rewrote five of them). Its files were frozen by hash before any implementing agent saw them, and then it was scored once. That first score is kept exactly as it came out:

All suggestions were left pending and nobody reviewed them: this scores the draft sheet before a human touches it.

Four things I didn't expect:

1. The keyword list earned its seat. On the sheet, rules alone (0.433) actually beat Gemma alone (0.403). Gemma read more person-days right, but each reader caught things the other missed. Together they halved the missed cancellations.
2. "Mostly right" can still make a wrong sheet. Gemma + rules read 17 of 20 person-days right, yet the sheet matched only about half the time slots. The biggest culprit was "Please change my availability on monday to 1-4 pm". The hours were right, but nothing treated it as a replacement, because "change" wasn't one of my replacement words. So the old all-day Monday stayed underneath.
3. Every fix went into Python, not the prompt. The prompt is the same version that was scored. Five deterministic fixes followed: explicit dates beat weekday words, "change" became a replacement cue, a firm follow-up settles a maybe, "T. Vekar" is an ambiguity rather than a stranger, and the rules learned more negations. Re-scored from the same saved Gemma outputs, set C now reaches 1.0, but I label that post-hoc: I fixed what I'd seen, so it proves little about new messages.
4. Honest numbers are less impressive and more useful. An earlier set B (20 messages) scored 30/35 person-days and 0.776 sheet agreement on its first scoring. Every frozen table, every caveat and every after-the-fact change is in RESULTS.md.

Built with

• 🧠 Gemma 4 E2B (gemma4:e2b-it-qat, Apache 2.0) in Ollama. About a 4.3 GB download and about 1.6 GB of memory once loaded on my 8 GB Mac, so it runs alongside a browser. It's the reader in the local app, and it produced every saved answer in the replay.
• ☁️ Render hosts the fictional replay, so judges can click through a full week without installing anything. The server runs in a demo mode that refuses any message, roster or week it didn't serve, and it never calls a model.
• ✅ GitHub Actions runs on every push and pull request to main, with three jobs: 128 unit tests (8 tracing tests skip without the optional SDK); a SHA-256 check that the frozen evaluation results haven't been touched; and a re-score of all three test sets from the saved model outputs, with no model calls. Run #29 passed all three jobs.
• 🔭 Sentry Agent Tracing is opt-in and off by default. When on, two allowlists in my adapter limit what's sent to structure: timings, token counts, model and stage names. Message text, names, quotes, prompts and replies are excluded, and offline tests check that planted fake content never appears. The traces earned their keep. In one run, four model calls hit the 300-second client deadline waiting for Ollama. A later run made 49 calls in 1.42 minutes with no errors. (The traces don't say why the earlier calls stalled, and I won't pretend they do.) One caveat I found: received traces showed location (geo) attributes that my code doesn't send. After a settings change, the four I inspected appeared filtered, but I haven't audited everything Sentry receives (dated evidence).

One traced run: four Gemma calls in a row each hit the 5-minute client timeout. The selected call shows "No input for this span": no message text was sent.

Every push to main runs three jobs: unit tests, a SHA-256 check of the frozen evidence, and a re-score from saved Gemma replies with no model calls.

The replay is one free Render web service, managed by a Blueprint. Every push to main auto-deploys it, including the commit that added the new sender warnings (84d5fec).

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Volunteer availability is quietly personal. "I'm at a wedding." "If my work shift gets moved." Read together, a week of these messages maps people's families, jobs and lives. Here's what an open model on the coordinator's own laptop makes possible:

1. The messages stay on the computer. In the local app they go only to Ollama on 127.0.0.1. There's no cloud AI service in the loop, and optional tracing is off unless you turn it on.
2. No account, no API key, no per-message bill. Once Ollama and the model are installed, it works offline. A small food pantry can afford "free forever".
3. It fits the hardware people actually have. An 8 GB laptop is enough, so the volunteer coordinator doesn't need a GPU or a budget.
4. It can be checked. The prompt, the schema, the rules, the test sets and the frozen scores are all in the repo. Anyone can re-score them from the saved outputs without running a model, which is exactly what CI does.
5. It can be swapped. The model is a menu choice of whatever Ollama has installed. I also evaluated Qwen3.5 4B against the same answer keys.

A hosted API might be smarter. But the right answer to "where do my volunteers' messages go?" should be "nowhere".

What it can't do (yet)

• It has only seen fictional messages. No real coordinator has used it, and the test sets share an author with the code, except set C.
• Times are read as written; the timezone field is stored but not converted. "At 9" isn't read.
• Up to 20 volunteers, one browser tab, and nothing is saved between sessions.
• The keyword reader still misreads some phrasings. It read "Saturday 9–12 if it isn't raining" as unavailable instead of conditional, which is exactly why every suggestion sits beside its message.
• Not tested in Safari, Firefox or with a screen reader.

Prize Categories

• Best Use of Gemma: Gemma 4 E2B is the local reader, held to a strict "copy the words, code does the maths" contract, measured against a rules baseline and a frozen test set written by a separate AI session.
• Best Use of Render: the interactive replay that lets anyone review a full fictional week without installing a model.
• Best Use of GitHub Copilot (via GitHub Actions): unit tests, a frozen-evidence integrity check and a cache-only re-score of every test set on every push and pull request.
• Best Use of Sentry Agent Tracing: opt-in, content-free model-call traces that surfaced the 300-second timeouts.

Slow and steady: the model reads, the code reconciles, and a person decides. If you coordinate volunteers, how do you collect availability today, and what's the message that always breaks your spreadsheet? 🦥