Upe | Crowdsourcing hyperlocal community information in Latin America

Abstract

Upe is a digital space for locals to crowdsource and curate community information that’s important to them.

While developed areas have institutional infrastructure to provide this integral information, remote tourist destinations in Costa Rica do not. Not even our local police phone number is publicly available–even in common places like Google. Local's are left helpless, not knowing who to contact in critical situations.

"When is the next disruption in my water service?"
"When is recycling pickup in my community?
"What's the number to the nearest police station?"

Currently, the best place to find answers to these questions are in private WhatsApp chats and social media groups.

Locals needed a single, convenient place to aggregate and verify important information–so that everyone can access it. We bootstrapped Upe (https://u.pe) to fulfill this need.

How does this initiative support Public Goods?

Upe provides an public good by making vital community information available to everyone online.

Our goal is to create an open source playbook and framework for other communities to bootstrap. There are hundreds of communities in Latin America, and the world at large, navigating similar challenges and opportunities that will benefit from the information derived from this experiment.

How is it non-excludable?

Information is publicly available for everyone at https://u.pe, which is live today. 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.

How is it non-rivalrous?

Access to information will not deplete as it is consumed.

EXPERIMENT 1 COMPLETED: Upe Is Interesting to Locals

For our first experiment, we activated 20 locals to join a team led by one of our founders. Our core mission was to aggregate and publicly share useful, real-time information about our community. See Experiment 1 team checklist and documentation for more details.

These participants were onboarded as the genesis cohort of curators and stewards of the local information aggregated on Upe. They were incentivized to earn points in the Upe ecosystem by:

1. Curating information on the Upe platform
2. Showing up to designated IRL meetups, hacking sessions, and community improvement activities e.g. beach cleanups
3. Collecting donated vouchers from local businesses

Points accrued in this experiment (and the upcoming) will be redeemable for vouchers to local businesses at a later date.

Outcome

Upe has confirmed through our initial experiment that there is synergy around this curating of our community's living information. We have attracted a community of 20 local contributors. Moreover, the content generated on our platform has proven to be useful to locals. Upe receives more than 15k unique users per month.

Participants smashed two of Upe's previous monthly records:

• 2X number of listings entered
• 2X new user sign-ups

Collectively we volunteered 26 hours of our time to participate in community beach cleanups organized by local NGO, The Clean Wave. Contributors synced at local meetups, and digitally for a community town hall call. Additionally, teams worked async to complete their checklist.

Through these interactions, we have established a series of questions to surface what local's deem vital information:

• What critical local information are you currently unable to find online?
• What local information would improve day-to-day living here?
• When are the next community events and how can I participate?
• What services or goods do you have a hard time finding here? What do you wish there was more of?
• Which businesses would you love to receive local vouchers from?

Our next experiment will iterate on getting answers from more locals, as well as ensuring the information is readily available for everyone to find.

Challenges/Hurdles

Before our experiment, a majority of our content was generated by the founders, and a few core business users. Community organizations and NGOs do not have the bandwidth to share and syndicate critical information, making our work vital contribution to our local ecosystem.

Without incentives, users are not motivated to contribute to the information creation process. In order to correct the free rider problem, participants can exchange points for vouchers from local businesses. By teaming up with local businesses, we are keeping the capital from this grant circulating within our local economy. This naturally creates a flywheel to strengthen the Upe network.

Upe Needs Funding to Iterate on Our Initial Experiment

Due to the outcome from our initial experiment, we need funding now to keep the momentum with contributors going and eliminate the free rider problem.

Over the next 6 months, we are conducting a feasibility study (online and IRL) to determine if contributors will cultivate and self-manage their living, critical information so that the community at large can access it when they need it.

Even though local businesses are already altruistically giving vouchers for Upe's participants to redeem for goods and services, our goal is to form long-term, mutually beneficial partnerships to avoid donor fatigue and foster a sense of community.

Deliverables

• Implement a bounty board to complete tasks based on contributor feedback and community requests.
• Onboard local contributors to complete bounties.
• Procure vouchers from local businesses.
• Provide documentation on the local onboarding initiative and reception of crypto from this experiment for Public Nouns to use for press, and flex the positive impacts of public goods.

Impact

The outcome of having this public information is beneficial many times over. At its most critical use case, having the correct emergency services information listed can potentially saves lives.

By sharing community event information across our local network, more participants will amplify the impact of their initiatives. For example, when Upe's cohort showed up to the Tamarindo beach cleanup, we doubled the number of participants.

Feedback Loop

We are creating a feedback loop by collecting data from locals about what information they deem important, what is missing (so that we can collectively add it), as well as the pain points that make daily life in remote tourism towns challenging.

Additionally, Upe is uncovering what is working, and what's challenging for onboarding non-crypto natives through activation events and community quests.

Recipient Address

upe.eth

Amount in ETH

5 ETH

Use of Funds

• Onboard local community: 1) local contributors to fulfill local bounties 2) NGOs and community initiatives to receive donations and 3) businesses to purchase gift certificates
• Community activation events e.g meet ups, hacking sessions, etc.
• Team drivers: onboarding efforts, wrangling contributors, verifying work
• Tech, software, dev, debugging

Other Reasoning

We want Public Nouns to pop our public goods grant cherry. Our founders personal connections with many Public Nouners have been instrumental in the evolution of Upe.

Moreover, our Ask comes with a Give. The success that will come from the execution of this grant will be proof of the power of Public Nouns, and we will provide written documentation on our experiment and results so that they can be shared with the public goods community at large. Positive sum gains or bust!

Lastly, Upe is forming strategic partnerships + community alliances at the local to international level. Collaborations include: Instituto de Costaricense Tourismo (Costa Rica's Tourism board), ADI Tamarindo and The Clean Wave.