Please describe your proposed solution.
In addition to the development of the OpenLitterMap platform, we need improved marketing campaigns and gaming experiences to foster user adoption, build a strong network, and create bigger datasets faster.
LitterWeekTM (already trademarked in Ireland) is our new ultimate litter data collection championship for schools. School teams already compete at sports, but you need to be very good at everything to get on the sports team. You don’t have to be good at anything if you want to get on your school's data collection team and compete against other schools for 1st place in the championship to earn prizes like iPhones, xbox subscriptions, and laptops.
Instead of just 1 day or week in the year where everyone must participate (eg. earth day, science week), schools and teams can take the LitterWeek challenge any week that suits them and repeat their effort any number of times. The competition will run year-round, with prizes announced at the end of the school year (In Ireland, that means May). In partnership with UNESCO, University College Dublin and Science Foundation Ireland, we have already piloted this campaign in 2 schools in Ireland and we have the ability to expand this study to 500+ schools next year if the platform and tools (openlittermap) can be developed to meet society's high expectations.
There is a unique opportunity for a remarkable scientific publication here which we is included in this proposal, as this will be many students first experience with citizen science. Therefore, we want to create a study that before introducing the students to the intervention, we ask them to tell us how they feel about their ability to create positive social and environmental change to tackle issues like climate change and plastic pollution. We will then introduce the LitterWeek challenge, and empower them with high-quality education content that teachers in various modules (eg. Languages, Science, Technology, Geography, etc) can adopt in the classroom.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
We will onboard many new users and legitimise openlittermap for institutional adoption.
KPI 1. Increasing the number of dapps and products available for the community to use that help to enrich the ecosystem with new use cases
- New LitterWeek.org website will be a powerful marketing campaign for adoption,
- Open source.
- First national citizen science campaign in Ireland
- This will create a significant baseline dataset to evaluate the state of litter and plastic pollution.
- We will publish a study detailing the impact this intervention had on the perception of the students’ ability to create positive change.
- Demonstrate catalysts ability for real-world impact
- Strengthen openlittermap recognition globally, particularly across institutions and academia.
- New educational material and lesson plans that schools, teachers and other practitioners can adopt in the classroom.
KPI 2. Increase the number of integrations that bring existing solutions together for a more seamless and connected experience between different products.
- We will onboard many new people into OpenLitterMap which is already catalyst funded through this new litterweek campaign.
- There are other citizen science projects being developed on Cardano (eg. water quality testing) that we would love to work with to develop shared resources that we can connect and collaborate on.
- Every team creating a product on Cardano will be able to participate in the LitterWeek challenge. This is a great way to engage your distributed community and encourage developed of open source solutions. Several cardano and crypto related groups already exist in the openlittermap teams which will be ported to LitterWeek.
- By scoring points, teams and individuals can increase their position in the leaderboard, and improve the visibility of their connected social accounts. Like getting upvoted in reddit, we want to champion the people and teams making the biggest impact.
- We want to replicate this study in other locations around the world, and work with others or encourage people to use our code to do it independently.
- We will also leverage existing products in the Cardano ecosystem such as the new Lace wallet to make transacting with Littercoin as easy as possible.
KPI 3. Increased quality of existing products & integrations through suggested improvements that is supported by customer feedback or increased usage by the community.
- OpenLitterMap works but it is too academic. We need a newer, more colourful, easier to understand message that society can understand and adopt.
- LitterWeek is the solution. Anyone can sign up and take the LitterWeek challenge for 1 week, any week that suits them, and repeat it multiple times if they wish.
- LitterWeek is intended to be used by schools and corporate partners who will compete against each other for prizes and community recognition.
- We host a weekly call every Thursday to show what we are working on and invite anyone in to share feedback and help shape the next steps and future direction of our work.
- This will help us generate increased interest in Littercoin and find improved ways to market and facilitate adoption.
- This will help us test and generate citizen science capacity and bring people into other apps we are developing.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
We have already piloted this in 2 schools which was very well received. We have the potential to roll this out in 500+ schools, but there is no guarantee they will have the time and capacity to take the LitterWeek challenge. Although we probably won’t get nationwide capacity on day 1, the development of citizen science is a continuous iterative process that needs to get started sooner rather than later.
Creating the best materials possible that are essential to meet society's high expectations and transform our knowledge about our impact on the environment will be challenging. We want to create immersive educational material including a short comic book series, and immersive frontend content that will capture the imagination of students and inspire them to keep learning.