U.pe Secures Funding from Public Nouns to Amplify Community Information Outreach
We are pleased to share that Public Nouns has extended a significant grant to support U.pe's Season 2, championing our mission to broaden our community-driven information platform in Costa Rica.
This financial boost arrives at a pivotal time in furthering our goals with U.pe, to delve deeper into local engagements and illuminate indispensable information for everyday living. From quick access to local emergency numbers to updates on essential utilities like water service disruptions, U.pe is dedicated to ensuring such data remains transparent and available to everyone.
Here's what Public Nouns' backing will facilitate in our pursuit:
Local Contributor Integration: Encouraging more locals to join in, fulfilling information requests, and enriching our content.
Community Engagement: Collaborating with local businesses to introduce voucher donations as a token of appreciation for community participation.
Community Events: Spearheading community meetups, hackathons, and quests.
Local Feedback: A direct channel to the local pulse, understanding the information they deem crucial.
Strategic Alliances: Carving out synergistic associations with local institutions and enterprises.
Knowledge Sharing: Consolidating our experiences and insights to disseminate within the expansive public goods arena.
Our alignment with Public Nouns' vision of nurturing societal welfare initiatives makes this collaboration even more meaningful.
In the words of Skye, at Public Nouns:
"Why I like this experiment: If the U.pe team can figure out how to make this system work in local spots, and it ends up creating "public good" value for communities, it could scale across the world in every spot that is in need of similar. Yes, it is not an easy journey, but if the U.pe team can rapidly experiment, learn, share, adjust and repeat, it could be a very efficient system to get to what is needed."
To Public Nouns, our gratitude is profound from every one of us at U.pe. Together, we aspire to achieve constructive outcomes and continue our #building and growth journey. Stay connected for riveting updates on this new venture. Take a look at our proposal by visiting it here:
https://publicnouns.wtf/vote/20/
What's U.pe Up To Now?
Attracting New Contributors by Offering Bounties for Community Information
U.pe immediately set up a bounty system for contributors to share information in their forum. Our goal was to find, confirm, and aggregate the contact information of 50 public service providers, e.g., police, post office, and government offices. U.pe has already completed 75% of these and can be seen listed on the Community Directory. Some information, though, has been challenging to find. To follow the progress of our bounty board, check out the Season 2 LeaderBoard.
Searching for and Syndicating Important Information on U.pe Platform
In addition to verifying and aggregating critical public service provider information on the U.pe platform, U.pe has upcoming bounties slated for collecting contact information on community organizations and NGOs and a goal of adding 50 events to the Community Calendar monthly. We met our goal in August and are on our way to making quota in the next few months as new contributors join forces.
Collecting Local Feedback and Iterating on Popular Requests
We launched the U.pe forum for contributors in August and are now opening it up for locals to join in community Q&As and browse events and updates. Locals also expressed interest in a digest for community events instead of group chats and multiple social channels, so U.pe has recently created a weekly newsletter that has attracted hundreds of subscribers. The events input by contributors are featured in both the forum and the newsletter.
Building and Reinforcing Community Alliances
Members of U.pe's network have been supporting The Clean Wave since its inception in 2017–well before our inception. Founder Andres Bermudez has a mission to keep every beach in Costa Rica clean. U.pe founder V4N recalls the first time she met Bermudez, "I was a volunteer for one of his cleanups in the town of VillaReal. That area is often overlooked since it's not directly on the beach, and what was cool was he had over 40 volunteers. I was so impressed that he activated that many people for an underserved location."
V4N helped Bermudez set up a web3 wallet, then had him secure his organization's ENS: thecleanwave.eth. Since then, they've been dipping their toes in web3, giving away POAPs to volunteers who participate in the cleanups. They've also teamed up with Seabums NFT project to give away one NFT for every three cleanups.
Bermudez was also one of U.pe's first core contributors, and now some of his volunteers are becoming new contributors to U.pe. In addition to contributors leveraging their networks for community info, the organizations will be unifying to onboard locals to web3 at weekly beach cleanup events.
The Clean Wave and U.pe are also working with local NGOs SalveMonos and Asociación Playa Grande Sostenible to raise awareness about deforestation of the howler monkey habitat and funds for constructing monkey bridges in Playa Grande. About Monkey bridge 411 – Bored Ape #5472 and Mutant Ape #1557 have pledged their support to amplify the message across web3 regen communities.
U.pe + Public Nouns = IRL Impact.
U.pe envisions this initial experiment as the first step in a long-term, strategic partnership with Public Nouns. V4N believes that Public Nouns community ethos aligns with our efforts to create tools local communities need to communicate with and activate their network:
"What I love most about the Public Nouns community is their willingness to share–not just financial resources, but their time and expertise. We had face time this year with many of the holders–at ETH Denver, MetaFest, and DAO Palace–and were able to workshop the experiment so that we had a plan to produce a public good mutually beneficial to both communities."
U.pe is halfway through Season 2, so check back for more updates on our public goods projects in Guanacaste, Costa Rica.
