Relay — Feature Overview

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Relay User

Published March 25, 2026

Relay — Feature Overview

Relay is a relational intelligence platform for people who shepherd others at scale — angel investors, pastors, nonprofit leaders, and community builders managing 50–300+ asymmetric care relationships.

Core Philosophy

Surface the 5–9 people who need you most this week, with everything you need to make them feel seen.

Relay is built on composable primitives, not siloed features. Every capability works across every entity type.

1. Universal Entity Type System

  • Everything is an Entity with a Type — Person, Project, Task, Event, Group, Place, Link, Video, Course, and more
  • New verticals (ministry, investing, nonprofit) are just type configurations on the same infrastructure
  • Extension tables (Person, Task, etc.) add type-specific fields without forking the core
  • JSONB attributes for flexible, schema-free data on any entity

2. Three Intelligence Layers

Engagement Intelligence (Shepard Tone)

  • Tracks interaction recency, frequency, and quality across all relationships
  • At-risk detection: flags contacts who have gone silent past a configurable threshold
  • Daily briefing surfaces the 5–9 people who need attention most
  • Engagement scoring feeds into canvas sorting and prioritization

Matching Intelligence

  • Connects people who need help with people who can help
  • Pool-based matching with ranked candidate scoring
  • Confirm/reject workflow with full audit trail

Journey Intelligence

  • Tracks where people are in defined pathways (e.g., Student Journey: Discover → Connect → Commit → Serve → Lead)
  • Stage-gate criteria for advancement
  • Automated progression suggestions

3. Interactive Canvas

  • Spatial, drag-and-drop grid for visualizing any set of entities
  • Multi-select with keyboard nav (Shift+click, Ctrl+click, arrow keys)
  • Bulk actions: tag, delete, assign to group, export
  • Layout algorithms: grid, circular, cluster, hierarchical
  • Visual connections between entities (mentor→mentee, investor→founder)
  • Canvas is reusable — a Group detail view IS a canvas scoped to members

4. Atlas — Entity Enrichment

  • Happenstance AI network search: discovers mutual connections and shared traits
  • Brave Search + Firecrawl web enrichment: auto-populates bios, social links, photos
  • LLM summarization: generates concise person summaries from enrichment data
  • Progressive loading with real-time status updates
  • Public Atlas search at /atlas — searchable entity directory

5. Composable Widget System

  • 8 widget types: Doc, Table, Calendar, Library, Canvas, Map, Communicator, Atlas
  • ViewSpec JSON defines layout + panels → any combination of widgets
  • LLM-assisted view generation: describe what you want in natural language
  • Widgets render any entity type consistently via the Types Registry

6. Document & Note System

  • Full Tiptap WYSIWYG editor with markdown support
  • YAML frontmatter for metadata
  • Task checkboxes with progress tracking
  • Collaborative editing via Yjs CRDT
  • Forms with logic rules, actions, and field-to-entity mapping
  • One-click publishing with public URLs

7. Communication Hub

  • Email sync via Nylas (Gmail, Outlook)
  • Newsletter system with draft/send/schedule workflow
  • Slack integration for team notifications
  • Communication events feed into engagement scoring automatically

8. MCP Server for AI Agents

  • Full Model Context Protocol server at /api/v1/mcp
  • 30+ tools auto-generated from the Action Registry
  • Same actions available in GUI, Dock, and MCP — one source of truth
  • Bearer token auth with organization API keys
  • Stdio mode for Claude Desktop integration
  • Tools include: entity CRUD, person creation, note creation, touchpoint logging, daily briefings, journey management, matching, canvas manipulation, view composition

9. Universal Action System

  • Action Registry: single source of truth for every user action
  • Each action declares which surfaces it appears on: :mcp, :dock, :gui
  • Undo support: soft-delete, revert, with session-scoped undo stack
  • Audit logging: every action is logged with actor, resource, surface, and params
  • Dock command bar: keyboard-driven action launcher (Cmd+K style)

10. ML Pipeline (Local, No Cloud)

  • Image quality scoring via Vix (libvips)
  • Face detection via Evision YuNet/SFace
  • CLIP embeddings via Bumblebee (Phase B)
  • All inference runs in-process via Nx — no external ML services
  • ModelManager orchestrates model loading and resource management

11. Ministry Vertical (Default Template)

  • Pre-configured entity types: International Student, Volunteer, Host Family, Staff
  • 5-stage Student Journey pathway
  • Matching pools for pairing students with hosts/volunteers
  • Engagement scoring tuned for campus outreach cadence
  • Other verticals: Church, School, Custom

12. Architecture Highlights

  • Elixir/Phoenix with LiveView — server-rendered, real-time, no SPA complexity
  • PostgreSQL with JSONB, pgvector, full-text search
  • Oban for background jobs (enrichment, email sync, scoring)
  • PubSub for real-time entity updates across all connected clients
  • Passwordless auth via magic email OTP
  • Fly.io deployment with staging/production pipeline

Built for people who care about people — at scale.