Description
Upe is empowering IRL communities of local changemakers and leveraging web3 technology to coordinate and deploy their ecosystem. We are running a series of experiments to see what contributors need to coordinate, crowdsource and verify hyperlocal information. Season 1 contributors were 48% women and 24% minorities. Our aim for this next season is to onboard more Costa Ricans and women into our ecosystem. Our Season 2 experiment involves co-creating four local community pages in Guanacaste, Costa Rica.Vision
Upe envisions a world where every local community has complete autonomy over their unique information and live local updates. We aim to decentralize and democratize the way local knowledge is curated and shared, by connecting individuals and fostering a culture of collective intelligence. Our goal is to use blockchain technology to validate and celebrate every contribution, preserving their impacts in a transparent way. Ultimately, Upe aspires to be the nucleus of a Latin American network of interconnected, self-sustaining, and empowered communities.❓Problem❓
Our communities in Guanacaste do not have the resources and tools to efficiently curate and disseminate local information. Critical knowledge is fragmented and gated in private chats and social media groups. Sometimes our well-intentioned efforts overlap and cause unnecessary friction, making it difficult to collaborate in the future. Moreover, we have grown accustomed to global algorithms controlling the flow of our local information– often exploiting it for profit–and rarely giving us what we need when we need it most. It is more than a full time job to pilfer through Facebook and WhatsApp groups to get access to what should be easy information to find.Solution
Upe seeks to unite those who are in the loop to fill in the gaps, so that the entire community can have public access to local knowledge. We bootstrapped the [Upe web app] (https://u.pe) and a [forum](https://f.u.pe) from open source components for local contributors to disseminate, search and filter community information in a public space.We are currently inviting locals in our community to become contributors to the sharing and syndicating of hyperlocal knowledge. We crowdsource the information on the forum, and have implemented a bounty board to reward those contribute.
Check out the Upe Season 2 Leaderboard for real time updates of our Contributors’ progress.
Upe is tracking who completes which bounties in order to issue on chain using Ethereum Attestation Services for contributions in each local community. We need the historical data of where we crowdsourced our information from to be in public view. By putting these attestations on chain, we preserve the transparency of the work done, and can more efficiently iterate and build upon the community narrative.
Below is our plan of action for rolling out attestations across our community.
🧪 The Experiement🧪
For Season 2, we are crowdsourcing information from local community members to add to the community pages on our newly built forum. The community-generated content enables each area to have sovereignty over the information they publish and syndicate. Currently Upe has 3 roles within the ecosystem:
- Driver - Assumes responsibility for a bounty brought to completion
- Approver - Verifies the information is correct
- Contributor - Gives answers to the requested information in the forum and/or inputs the information into the Upe platform.
Season 2 kicks off with Drivers asking, and Contributors answering several community-based questions in our public forum. The answers from the questions will be used to create bounties to either share information or input it into the platform. Once the Contributors complete the first wave of bounties, the first iteration of the community pages will be generated. Public Nouns is funding bounties and for work involving collecting and sharing information about public service providers and community events.
The diagram below outlines the flow of how community contact information is sourced and verified:
After this wave of information has been crowdsourced verified, Upe will publish the information on the inaugural version of the community pages in the coming weeks. This milestone will undoubtedly foster a sense of collaboration within the local community. But this is just the beginning…
Other waves of discussions and bounties for more user-generated content will be issued to shape the second iteration of the community pages–and this is where we would be using the funding for this grant. See the heart-shaped area labelled “What Makes My Community Unique + Awesome”
We have some talented content creators and tech savvy folks in the area, and we see this as an opportunity to create a community of local champions–effectively greenpilling them all into web3. Discussions about the content are already under way. Examples of requests we have already received include: weather and tides, sunset of the month photo contest, PSAs on best local practices, road conditions, local history lessons, job board. You can view the wireframe for a community page HERE. See below for the flow for content bounties.
If the experiment succeeds, then the data is public for others to use and we integrate the knowledge as we continue to build a framework and toolkit for other local communities to bootstrap and steward their information. If we fail, the data is public for others to learn from.
How is Upe encouraging women & minorities?
First and foremost, the Upe public-facing platform is bilingual: English and Spanish. Instead of relying on Google translate, Costa Rican contributors translated the content.Additionally, it’s no secret here that private groups on social media and private messaging chats hold a lot of this valuable tribal knowledge. Our bounty system is favorable to both women and minorities, as the rewards are enough to incentivize them to share, validate and input valuable information they have, but have never been compensated for before–until now. Women and local Costa Ricans are the driving force of the current network effect here, and we foresee this trend to carry over into Upe.
🌱The Impact 🌱
Every new Upe Contributor creates a wallet to collect attestations for their contributions to the community pages, and therefore we onboard our users into the Ethereum ecosystem. By acclimating locals today, we can better position our community for the future.Validation / Traction / Progress so far
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Season 1 experiment completed! We onboarded 20+ local contributors and received $3.5k in voucher donations from local businesses
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Awarded funding from Public Nouns for bounties and issuing attestations for publishing public service information and community events on community pages.
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Collaboration with ICT (Costa Rica Tourism Ministry) & ADI Tamarindo: VisiteTamarindo.cr
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$3500 in Upe Community Chest donations from local businesses
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POAPs issued for local meetups, onboarded by Upe and completing Season 1
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Greenpill locally administered: QF round at Metacamp - beneficiaries included locals in Playa Grande
Team
V4N (Vanessa) | 
the storyteller | content, UX, frontend dev, feedback loops
DBrick (Danielle) | 
the creative | graphic design, frontend dev, social media, community connector
Estefania | 
the connector | outreach, marketing, word artist, content creatorGrant Amount
4d4n (Adan) | 
the dev | front- and backend dev, systems admin, hacker
AngryNative (Ben) | 
the biz | business ops, the breaker, the fixer, local community pillar
Amount in USD
$10,000 USDWhat it will be used for?
The funds received would be used towards fulfilling the goal of onboarding locals into web3 and giving them the collective task to coordinate and customize what type of content goes on their community pages specifically:- Fulfilling bounties for locals to create and share content on local community pages,
- Issuing on-chain attestations with ERC-721 to track contributions.
- IRL meet up expenses e.g. snacks, drinks, supplies
| Expenses | Amount |
|---|---|
| Community page content bounties to complete 2 FEATURED & 4 MINI FEATURE content in Tamarindo | $1750 |
| Community page content bounties to complete 2 FEATURED & 4 MINI FEATURE content in Playa Grande | $1750 |
| Community page content bounties to complete 2 FEATURED & 4 MINI FEATURE content in Potrero/Flamingo | $1750 |
| Community page content bounties to complete 2 FEATURED & 4 MINI FEATURE content in Huacas/Brasilito | $1750 |
| Top Community Sharer Bounty | $500 |
| Contributor Attestations: includes artwork, dev, metadata & deployment | $1500 |
| IRL meetup misc expenses for onboarding sessions and workshops: snacks and drinks, supplies, space rental fee, incidentals | $1,000 |
Attach any additional documents/resources about the project if you have any.
- Season 2 Manifesto
- Season 2 Leaderboard
- Community Page Mobile Mockup
- Season 1 Quest HackMD
- Season 1 Leaderboard
- Public Nouns grant proposal
- Upe Forum
- U.pe web app
- Collaboration with ICT & ADI Tamarindo: VisiteTamarindo.cr
- Metacamp miniQF round for Public Goods in Playa Grande