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# Abstract
Upe is developing real-world use cases within our local community that leverage blockchain technology to scale a public good. Our model can be duplicated or forked for any local community to replicate.

Our mission is to empower local communities to crowdsource, curate and syndicate their information. We are bringing together those who are in the loop to fill in the knowledge gaps, and those who have access to local networks to share, so that the entire community can benefit from being able to access local information.

Upe is extending its grassroots experiment of taking a community-first approach to developing the tooling and knowledge base needed for people to curate and syndicate hyperlocal information. Our mission is to create an open-source playbook aimed at bootstrapping local communities and making them stewards of the collective’s information. The playbook will include:

* Tech stack recommendations and repos
* Docs, instructions and other materials for synergizing IRL community
# How Does This Initiative Support Public Goods?
Upe provides a public good by making community information available to everyone.
## How is it non-excludable?
Information is publicly available for everyone on the main Upe platform ( https://u.pe), the Upe forum (https://f.u.pe), and the Upe community digest (https://m.u.pe/d), all of which are live today and built using open source tech. The content on our platform is indexed and ranked in search engines so that more people outside our network can access and share community information.

Community information about water, security and other critical topics are often only shared in gated group chats. The Upe forum is now home to [monthly town water consumption reports](https://forum.u.pe/t/community-info-events-potrero-flamingo/228/218/), [annual beach clean up collection results](https://forum.u.pe/t/community-info-events-potrero-flamingo/228/222/), and [community association meeting recaps](https://forum.u.pe/t/community-info-events-potrero-flamingo/228/213), making this information, which was previously only available in private groups, publicly available to everyone. It’s clear the community finds this information important as there are spikes in forum traffic on days when the link to that information is shared in the weekly community digest.

## How is it non-rivalrous?
Access to information will not deplete as it is consumed.

# Upe Needs Funding to Extend Season 2
## Season 2 Recap
Upe has successfully created community resources that locals agree are “awesome, informative and non-toxic.” The Upe community digest has 1,000 local subscribers, continuously exceeds at 50% open rate on a weekly basis, and the traffic to the digest landing page exceeds the number on our syndication list.

See the full [Upe Season 2 Recap Report](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18SyoAowQ7FPSShECNtDoMODWuxLLQ3w7/view?usp=sharing) and [Season 2 grant on Karma GAP](https://gap.karmahq.xyz/project/upe-1/).

We have published hundreds of community events, and have since learned we underestimated the number of community events, which was 50, occurring monthly in our area. In actuality, we are publishing between 90 and 120 community events per month.


Anyone can sign up to post in our community forum, and verified users are eligible to have their information shared to Upe’s network. The Upe weekly digest now has a faithful following, and our community pages are featured in hundreds of rental properties, reaching property managers, hotels, and restaurants.

## Dawn of the Kooks
30+ local impact makers, aka the Upe Kooks, are assembling to collaborate on projects, and share knowledge and connections. The Kooks are key community players.

Visit our [Upe Hall of Kooks](https://forum.u.pe/t/hall-of-kooks/372).

Every week, a new Kook is added to the fold, and announced in the community digest. We have hosted a handful of meetups, and Kooks are beginning to self-organize in a group chat to share dank memes and photos of doggos. They are also sharing community events and info to be added to Upe, self-organizing to attend and support each other’s events and collaborating on local initiatives.
# Season 2 Extension Objectives
Now that we’ve collectively created a useful resource of hyperlocal information, it’s time to empower the community to take ownership of this information.

The extension of Season 2 through July 2024 has three objectives:

1. To work towards decentralizing the curation and syndication of community information;
2. To foster an environment to encourage Kooks and local contributors to connect and collaborate; and
3. To experiment with various sources of income potential to position Upe as a “naturally’ public but monetizable goods that can be funded through commercial channels by tweaking them a bit” (Vitalik, [The Revenue-Evil Curve](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/10/28/revenue_evil.html))

Since we began last August, an annual cycle for keeping community information flowing has become evident. A local community’s season lasts for 11 months followed by a one month break. The season is composed of four phases that take into account factors such as the seasons, tourism ebbs and flows, and school schedules. For the beach communities of Santa Cruz, Guanacaste, the new season starts in mid July and winds down mid June.


The season begins with a Master Planning phase to build and the blueprint and guidelines for everyone to implement during the season. A new season begins in mid August and lasts through the end of November. During this phase, Upe focus will be on tasks that ensure new assets and procedures are in place, new partners are properly onboarded, old information is sanitized, and old processes are properly sunsetted, among other tasks. It’s generally raining and tourism is low, so there’s more time for members to participate. December through April is our high season, and it’s difficult to attract help during this time because everyone is busy. The Peak Season Execution phase will provide insights about how the network performs during the season’s peak. After high season wanes, we have an annual Audit & Season Wrap Up to evaluate performance of the network’s impact, contributions made and more.
## Upe Deploys Local Quests
Upe has formed four types of local quests to steer the community towards fulfilling its mission of crowdsourcing, verifying and syndicating hyperlocal information:
* 🔦 **Search Party** - finds and verifies community info
* ⛴️ **Ship It** - syndicates community info
* 🪐 **Space Maker** - containerizes the Kooks and contributors
* 🌱 **Oh Grow Up** - grow the Upe network


Upe Kooks and other local builders will be able to sign up to help complete community quests from now until the end of July. We estimate that we need a minimum of 12, and will cap it at 40 local contributors to keep the hyperlocal information readily available to the public. At the end of each month, all contributions are reviewed and those who completed the quest will receive a POAP for participation.

# Challenges/Hurdles
## Objective 1: Work towards decentralizing the curation and syndication of community information.
In January we surveyed our community to get feedback on Upe's evolution. Not only were we able to capture the types of information they'd like to see, we also learned preferred channels and likelihood for sharing.

We are creating a simple-to-use mechanism to empower the local community to vote on which information they’d like to see elevated and syndicated. We have already begun this, and you can see the [Upe Local Digest Data Dashboard](https://lookerstudio.google.com/s/tpYvTGYOfhA) for all of our weekly voting results and more.


Drawing inspiration from spengrah’s [Anticapture](https://spengrah.mirror.xyz/f6bZ6cPxJpP-4K_NB7JcjbU0XblJcaf7kVLD75dOYRQ) framework, our voting process allows members to:

* **PROPOSE** new events to vote on by submitting them to the Upe community calendar.
* **DECIDE** which events they want to see elevated in the weekly local digest.
* **EXECUTE** by featuring the top voted events at the beginning of the digest and in Upe social media posts.
* **EVALUATE** if the voting mechanism functions as intended, and if it or the content needs to be adjusted.

By taking a community-first approach, it takes time to run an experiment and build trust, foster consistent user behavior and encourage new user adoption. There are no shortcuts to creating a feedback loop and iterating on requests.

## Objective 2: Foster an environment to encourage Kooks and local contributors to connect and collaborate.
Our biggest challenge is the wide range of technical abilities within our group. We are engaging in feedback loops to gain more knowledge about their tech habits and needs for sharing and collaborating, to build something that is simple and intuitive for most basic users.

Upe has already begun prototyping and testing the voting mechanism among the Kooks. After a few iterations, we implemented a partial vote capture after several people who claimed to have voted had not submitted their vote. We are receiving wildly varying results, between 65.7% - 89.7% completion rate. While we are seeing promising results and a [majority of voters returning week after week](https://lookerstudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/d9db3085-95a5-4235-82b6-e83bbd98624d/page/p_rgwv8nmvfd?s=tpYvTGYOfhA), we need more time to continue testing to refine our voting mechanism.

We are also initiating community quests in hopes of attracting more tech-oriented members in our community to support the Kooks and Upe’s mission of crowdsourcing and syndicating hyperlocal information. A bulk of the funds for this grant is allocated for quest completion, because we know that by completing these tasks together, it will build trust within the group.


## Objective 3: Experiment with various sources of income potential.
Upe can’t run on goodwill and grants forever. We need to find a way for our community to be self-sustaining. Referencing Vitalik’s [The Revenue-Evil Curve](https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2022/10/28/revenue_evil.html), Upe is evolving towards being a “‘naturally’ public but monetizable goods that can be funded through commercial channels by tweaking them a bit.”

Vitalik asserts that:
> One practical example of how this framework can be used to analyze decision-making is Wikimedia donations… I've always thought that they could and should fund themselves…by just adding a few advertisements, and this would be only a small cost to their user experience and neutrality.

*“Adding a few advertisements”* is easier said than done at a local level. Currently, we have a conflict of interest with hosting advertising as a revenue source. We have businesses ready and willing to give us money to advertise on Upe. It’s too early to define what we are offering and we don’t want to make packages for purchase, but we do want to test for community reception, and what community buy-in looks like. We surveyed tolerance of advertising space from within the community, and that is something that they are concerned would taint the integrity of Upe.

Our community has already posited the question internally on how this will not succumb to the fate of ad bloat. We don’t have an answer yet, but our members feel empowered to have a voice in the matter. More importantly, a much deeper issue has surfaced during our previous experiment: some locals were unwilling to share Upe with their network if local competitors or ads that could undercut their bottom line. For example, if one hotel agreed to pay for ad space, almost every other hotel AND property manager in the area would not participate in our network. However, even after Upe was given this ultimatum from several businesses, many were still willing to suggest alternatives for neutral advertisers in order to continue the conversation of sharing Upe resources with their network.

Traditional advertising is only one monetization model a local community can implement. Upe is creating a mechanism to unlock financial resources and coordination at both local and global levels by integrating microdata with big data while maintaining data ownership in local communities.

# Deliverables
* Prototype an easy-to-use mechanism to give collective voting power to the community members to choose what goes in the community digest and on community pages.
* Deploy and track progress of community quests for contributors, information syndicators, validators and local builders to keep community information free-flowing and non-biased.
* Experiment with community buy-in to curate community information and take ownership to syndicate it within their local network.
* Another awesome Upe Impact Report, a catalog of Kook Community Projects and Events during Season 2.

# Impact
The community agrees: having information public and accessible to all is important for everyone. For its most critical use case, having the correct emergency services information accessible saves lives. For daily users, Upe has become a resource for locals who want unbiased, no BS community information in one easy, convenient place. Plus we love sharing how much impact our Kooks make in the community. Here are a few examples:

* Kook #06’s event raised [$5,000 for monkey bridges](https://forum.u.pe/t/community-info-events-playa-grande-matapalo/154/22)
* Kook #09 has been [grilling out on Sundays](https://forum.u.pe/t/community-info-events-playa-grande-matapalo/154/47/) and donated over $1000 for Playa Grande lifeguards and kids park
* Kook #20 hosts bingo and brought in [$1,000 for Tamarindo’s lifeguards](https://forum.u.pe/t/community-info-events-tamarindo-langosta/221/153) and [$7,000 for the local animal shelter](https://forum.u.pe/t/community-info-events-tamarindo-langosta/221/174)
* Kook #24 and Kook #26 host regular games like [trivia](https://u.pe/events/trivia-surf-club-bar-grill/) where funds are donated to local charities and causes
* Kook #03 and Kook #05 collaborate on events like this [charity poker tournament](https://u.pe/events/charity-poker-here/) and [tree planting](https://u.pe/events/plant-one-pour-one-treeplanting-at-apami/)) to benefit a wildlife rescue

Most importantly, we are developing real world use cases within our local community that demonstrate the power of blockchain technology to scale a public good. Our model can be duplicated or forked by any local community to replicate. If Metcalfe’s Law is true, then as Upe unites more local communities, a metanetwork of hyperlocal impact makers will naturally emerge to share successes, failures and opportunities.

# Feedback Loop
Our extended round of experiments will collect data to create feedback loops:

* What do users find most valuable and useful?
* What channels are users accessing Upe through?
* Where is the community comfortable seeing advertising on Upe?
* Would locals, businesses or tourists pay to keep it ad free?
* Will new economic engines emerge from these local communities?
* Which quests were most easily completed by contributors and Kooks?
* Which quests need re-evaluation and why?

# Recipient Address
upe.eth
0xe6829705c43530973c9a9394513a18e6a60ea22a

# Amount in ETH
6.9 ETH & 1 Public Noun

The Public Noun will be awarded to one of the contributors who participate as a validator of voting and other community data derived from feedback loops.

# Use of Funds
* Local quests that steer the group towards fulfilling its mission of crowdsourcing, verifying and syndicating hyperlocal information.
* Tech, software, debugging & dev
* Community activation events e.g meetups, hacking sessions, etc.
* The Public Noun will be awarded to one of the Upe vote validators.

# Other Reasoning
1. We kicked ass with our last grant and have the [KarmaGAP](https://gap.karmahq.xyz/project/upe-1/) reviews to back it up.
2. Public Nouns will gain an awesome new member who is already a champion of public goods in Costa Rica.
3. MetaCartel gave us funds to host an event, but we’re not stopping at just one. We are hosting several: 1) monthly Kook and contributor meetups, 2) an Upe Town Hall and 3) a fundraiser collaboration in May.
4. Upe is *super serial* about moving their community and their data on chain. We have partnered with General Magic for our next phase of evolution.
5. Upe :heart: Public Nouns as much as we :heart: public goods. Many Public Noun members continue to be instrumental in Upe's growth, and we are grateful for sharing their knowledge, experience, time and resources as we navigate bootstrapping our genesis community.