Please describe your proposed solution.
At OpenLitterMap, we are turning cleaning the planet into a game with climate rewards. So far we have crowdsourced more than 700,000+ verified tags from over 7,500 people in 100 countries. We are collecting this data to train and launch the open source OpenLitterAI which will help automate the tagging process and lead to a more enjoyable real-time gaming and data collection experience. After 15 years of research and development, we got our 1st funding in Fund 4 which enabled us to debug and improve the functionality of our platform and bring Littercoin from theory and concept to mainnet and production. However, significantly more work needs to be done to develop a professional platform with a variety of new features that are required to meet society's high technological expectations and onboard both users and merchants into the zero waste Littercoin economy.
Our mission is to empower people with the tools they need to tell their story about the impact they are making in their communities. Globally, there are over 3 billion people who already possess a powerful device that can collect data, a source of human potential that is ripe for unlocking. Inspired by OpenStreetMap, the most comprehensive map of the world ever made (by over 10 million people), we are building a real-time data collection interface to overlay this open source global map of the world with simple but powerful open source geospatial data collection and visualisation tools.
Every day, more and more people are downloading our app to tell their story about the impact they are making in their communities. Starting with litter and plastic pollution, our platform enables anyone to take a photo of something, add a tag, and broadcast your message / impact / observation / report / story to the world. This hyper-local storytelling tool is already being used for a variety of purposes. Thanks to Fund 4, we were able to extend our predefined list of ~200 litter tags in several languages with custom tags, allowing anyone to collect data about anything. People have used OpenLitterMap to collect data on landslides, biodiversity destruction, crypto donation tracking, coastal erosion, vacancy/dereliction, infrastructure hazards, flooding, potholes, graffiti, walkability issues, and more. Our open source code has also been forked to map other emerging problems, including landmines in Ukraine and we encourage more use cases as our open source platform is designed to be a good starting point for anyone interested in real-world data collection.
Due to its ubiquity, notoriety, urgency, and abundance, mapping litter and plastic pollution has a low barrier to entry that can enable anyone to get involved with this real-world data collection renaissance. Simply grab your gardening gloves, head to your nearest street or park, and use your device to collect data on the impact and observations that you are experiencing. Unlike first generation social media that has focused almost exclusively on extracting as much human related data as possible, we are building a real-world non-human outdoor data collection intervention to transform our relationship with technology. Billions of people have joined social media with zero training about its immediate and permanent privacy destroying implications. Since schools do not adequately teach or prepare young minds about the responsible use and data collection purpose of technology, there is a need for an intervention that teaches people about the responsible use of technology in a real-world ethical context.
Ironically, one of OpenLitterMaps biggest challenges is that it remains overly rooted in its academic foundations. From an academic perspective, a global open source data collection interface for the internet is situated to unlock the potential provided by a global abundance of technology but in reality, society needs a more compelling narrative. To complement our academic philosophy, we are working on a new campaign that we believe will encourage many more people to participate. Interventions like Earth Day and World Cleanup Day harness significant human potential, but they are limited to just 1/365 or 1/52 times a year. Aimed at schools and wider society, we are developing a new data collection intervention for society: LITTERWEEK, to bring students up to speed with the latest trends in geospatial science (including citizen science, earth observation, GIS, open source coding practices, sensors, and more) and empower people to be a part of and represent their community. Over the course of a repeatable week, we want to work with corporate partners, parents, and their emerging young adults to demonstrate the true real-world impact quantification purpose of technology and invite groups into a real-world cleanup data collection competition with prizes at the end of the year for the most active and notable participants.
LITTERWEEK stands for Location Intelligence To Transform Environmental Reporting With Everyone's Empirical Knowledge.
How does your proposed solution address the challenge and what benefits will this bring to the Cardano ecosystem?
For crypto to be taken seriously, we need to facilitate, stimulate, and incentivise the quantification and communication of impact orders of magnitude better than contemporary systems. With Littercoin, we have created a real-world use case for crypto that is helping to solve a huge global problem that was created and accelerated by fiat systems. Plastic pollution is a global emergency just starting to fragment exponentially which is now found in unborn babies and will increasingly contaminate all life on Earth. Despite investing over $1.7T into firms who cause plastic pollution, banks, the custodians of unlimited government numbers of social control, see no value in investing in humanities data collection capacity to fix the problems they created. Governments rarely support intergenerational open source technological sustainability at schools or through universities or other public institutions as this way of doing things makes their unauditable monetary paradigm and other systems increasingly redundant.
Like Cardano, OpenLitterMap is rooted in long-term, academic, open source, and community driven processes that shape our direction. Every Friday at 6pm Irish time, we host an open community call that anyone can join to see what we are working on, watch us code live, and help shape the future direction of the platform. As a reward for using our app, our community is passively mining Littercoin in the background as another layer of gamification. Now that we have launched Littercoin which is trading for fruits and vegetables above 7.50 ada each, we are going on a mission to find all of the climate friendly zero-waste stores in the world and add them to our platform to give them all as much visibility and support as we can.
By supporting our proposal, we will be able to move from a few hours coding at the end of the week, to having full-time community development and IT support which is necessary to bring OpenLitterMap to new heights by empowering us to develop the compelling narrative and technology that we need a team to create.
How do you intend to measure the success of your project?
We measure our success through the data and impact created by our community. Success for us includes the launch of significant feature improvements to our platform, like developing access to each user's public profile, AI-assisted tagging, and better tools to characterise and search through the data to create maps and generate reports. Success for us includes taking new ideas from the weekly live open source community calls and developing them quickly, staying on-top of open source pull requests and weekly progress reports; and enabling the development of a more vibrant, active, and publicly trained open source development and data collection community.
With an opportunity to bring in additional team members we expect these numbers to increase. Success for us includes finding people with key competencies that can take full, part-time, and open source roles in the development of the technology and community. Our first hire will be a social media, marketing, and digital engagement specialist, who will be tasked with growing an engaged community and creating content about our ongoing and evolving impact. This needs to be complemented by IT, economic, UIUX, testing, documentation and more. We are doing much of this already, but things are moving incredibly slow at 3-4 hours development time per week due to repeated grant writing and funding applications taking up a lot of time. With support from Project Catalyst, we will be able to move fast, and show the world the disruptive impact funding potential of our tools.
Success to me would mean that more people will earn their crypto instead of having to pay for it. Now that we have Littercoin online, we need to find merchants willing to accept it. To achieve this, we are going to start collecting data on stores, businesses and stakeholders in the climate economy that we want to champion and give visibility to. In the next layer of Littercoin, we are going to create hard-coded incentives into the next layer of Merchant Token generation, enabling anyone who signs up a new climate partner to become an affiliate and get a percentage of the burn transaction as well as opening up the possibility for anyone to create their own layers to interact with the Littercoin ecosystem (eg, creating a game to put ada into the smart contract and claiming some of the ada as a fee for facilitating the game).
Please describe your plans to share the outputs and results of your project?
We have already developed several tools that continuously share the output and results of our progress. Visit openlittermap.com/community to see how much data we are uploading per minute. Keep the global map open to see a live stream of notifications appear as users add records to the database.
We recently launched a twitter bot that sends an automated daily impact report about how many new users created an account as well as how much data was created each day. With support, we can enable any of our active daily superusers to create their own twitter bot and tweet out whatever message they want to automate about their daily or weekly data-driven impact narrative.
Our tools work, but there is a lot of room for improvement. We need major updates to our codebase to make our technology easier and more intuitive to use.
We write a weekly summary of our progress at <https://medium.com/@weelyOLM> - with support, our community engagement person will be able to add everything in here, make sure it it published on time every week, and create more video content that summarise all of our progress into a series of weekly youtube updates. We also want to generate quarterly reports that summarise all of the progress and contributions that have been made by our growing global community.
To follow our progress, see what we are working on, and inspire others to get involved, we have made our trello boards publicly accessible:
<https://trello.com/b/RkGmQyEh/openlittermap-web>
<https://trello.com/b/kKI2qfxI/openlittermap-mobile>