From Trash to Treasure: Telling Stories of Impact on OpenLitterMap

[GENERAL] Name and surname of main applicant

Seán Lynch

[GENERAL] Email address of main applicant

info@openlittermap.com

Additional applicants

We have various partners, supporters and collaborators, including AWS, HOT OSM, and others who we will be able to share the funding to run important cleanup, data collection, hackathon, and other events and initiatives across the world.

[GENERAL] Please specify how many months you expect your project to last (from 2-12 months)

12

[GENERAL] Please indicate if your proposal has been auto-translated into English from another language.

No

[GENERAL] Does your project have any dependencies on other organizations, technical or otherwise?

No

[GENERAL] If YES, please describe what the dependency is and why you believe it is essential for your project’s delivery. If NO, please write “No dependencies.” .

No dependencies

[GENERAL] Will your project’s output/s be fully open source?

Yes

[GENERAL] If NO, please describe which outputs are not going to be open source. If YES, please write “Project will be fully open source.”

Project will be fully open source

github.com/openlittermap

[METADATA] Category of Proposal

RealFi

[METADATA] SDG rating

OpenLitterMap transcends all 17 SDGs to achieve peace through science.

https://openlittermap.medium.com/openlittermap-and-the-sdgs-ea3567d5085e

OLM has been identified as a Digital Public Good by the DPG Alliance who are endorsed by the UN Secretary General to find projects that can accelerate the attainment of the SDGs.

https://digitalpublicgoods.net/

[IMPACT] 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.

[IMPACT] 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.

[IMPACT] 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).

[IMPACT] 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

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What is your capability to deliver your project with high levels of trust and accountability?

Having already successfully completed and gone far beyond our initial Fund 4 proposal we have proved that we can deliver good value for money when delivering on our goals. Our 15+ year commitment to open source citizen science research on plastic pollution and public empowerment continues to be developed daily with or without support.

With support, we will be able to give more responsibilities to team members who can help us track and visualise every transaction and expense in our weekly reports and set high standards for using funds from Project Catalyst. 

You can find all of our Fund 4 transactions here

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OWy_bXu9Eeh7bSA0KLarP9TSQg7XJKKqPMGxiRTbAFk/edit#gid=0

With support we can include transaction IDs and additional data on how fiat was also spent

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] What are the main goals for the project and how will you validate if your approach is feasible?

1. Improve the social media - I am running all the socials, re-applying for the 150th+ funding applications, doing most of the coding, and trying to keep on track about everything the community wants and is doing. I need someone who can take this position, to welcome every member, grow the slack + discord + facebook groups, reach out to various groups, and give the community better representation than my narrow academic focus. To achieve this we are looking to hire a community development and digital engagement marketing specialist who can keep track of everything that's going on and write up the weekly report that we want to move to a youtube update.

1. Make our app awesome. Our tagging experience works, but it’s not great. We need to improve this and add new features to the app like a map, edit your own data, and better stats and charts.

1. Start working on the AI. We have 500,000 images and 700,000 verified tags ready to train the OpenLitterAI and integrate it into our app. Once we can get a first version done, we will be able to release the AI, its weights, and the images, with an invitation to various AI students to fork and iterate over our implementation, and work on getting it integrated to our data collection processes.

1. Clear all remaining pull requests. We have a backlog of pull requests that need to be cleared. Once a PR comes in, we should be on top of it to grow an active developer community. To achieve this, we need coding support (Laravel, Vue, React Native) to help us stay on top of things and get shit done.

1. Launch LITTERWEEK, a new data collection intervention aimed at schools and wider society. OpenLitterMap works, but its too academic. We are working on a new, more compelling narrative that will create lesson plans for schools and invite community groups to take our repeatable week-long data collection and cleanup challenge.

1.  Engage a variety of different stakeholders. As well as developing our community of users, we need help developing our community of stakeholders. We have been supported by AWS, HOT, and others want to be a part of the action. We need help developing and finding more of these relationships.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed breakdown of your project’s milestones and each of the main tasks or activities to reach the milestone plus the expected timeline for the delivery.

1. Improve the social media

Key activities: onboard suitable candidate; create a plan for outreach and keep track of metrics and findings. Cost = €15-20 an hour (€23,000-€33,000 per year)

1. Active developer community

Key activities: engage and onboard new and existing developers to focus on backend, frontend and mobile app improvements. This will help us eat through our trello cards and bring many new features into production.

1. Real world events

Once we have the community supported and app streamlined, we will be able to run cleanup, data, and coding hackathons with our partners across the world. This will enable us to gain more users and a much more active global community.

1. Littercoin Merchants

Now that Littercoin is online, we are ready to sign up merchants and bring climate transactions to Cardano.

[CAPABILITY/ FEASIBILITY] Please describe the deliverables, outputs and intended outcomes of each milestone.

Improve the social media & community representation

Key activities: onboard suitable candidate; create a plan for outreach and keep track of metrics and findings. Cost = €15-20 an hour (€23,000-€33,000 per year)

Deliverables

1. New recruit who can help grow & represent the OLM community
2. More likes, followers, engagement, outreach & partners
3. More app engagement as a result
4. Weekly blog + video reports about everything we have achieved

Outputs

1. New people onboarded into our already active community
2. WeeklyOLM blog post & youtube videos
3. New partners ready to join LitterWeek campaign and create events

Intended Outcome

1. Simplify the message that represents the entire openlittermap community to attract a broader spectrum of users.
2. Find new partners and community members to participate in real-world documented action.
3. More active discord & slack

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Active developer community

Key activities: engage and onboard new and existing developers to focus on backend, frontend and mobile app improvements. This will help us eat through our trello cards and bring many new features into production.

Deliverables

1. Movement on our trello boards 

2. Already trained devs training & supporting up new devs.

3. Detailed weekly releases communication with community manager for inclusion in weekly impact report

Outputs

1. New and existing devs actively contributing new features

2. Transformation of our app

3. More active global developer community

Intended Outcome

Work with the community to prioritise and test new releases.

Develop a stream of all the updates we are making to the code

Launch of the OpenLitterAI v0.1

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More real world events

Once we have the community supported and app streamlined, we will be able to run cleanup, data, and coding hackathons with our partners across the world. This will enable us to gain more users and a much more active global community.

Deliverables

1. Many people are already using OLM daily, which we need to integrate into the weekly reports.

2. Users will be able to create challenges and invite other users to participate in.

3. Work with partners to facilitate cleanup, data and coding hackathons at various universities and community groups around the world

Outputs

1. Work with the community to develop better storytelling tools
2. Launch of LitterWeek campaign
3. New partnerships

Intended Outcome

Celebrate our community and demonstrate the real-world use of our technology

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Littercoin Merchants

Now that Littercoin is online, we are ready to sign up merchants and bring climate transactions to Cardano.

Deliverables

1. Sign up merchants
2. Put them on the global map
3. Encourage them to adopt Littercoin

Outputs

1. Onboard first littercoin store to accept Littercoin
2. Create incentive structure for affiliates
3. Track transaction history and calculate our carbon offset footprint

Intended Outcome

Deliver a real-world use case for crypto

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown of the proposed work and resources.

This is what I need to grow a team and products over the next 12 months

Please note that I just cut this budget in half as I would prefer to apply again to Fund 11 and allow more projects to get funded in F10.

Community & business support - €30,000

Laravel developer - €30,000

Junior developer - €20,000

React Native - €15,000

AI developer - €15,000

Project Management - €15,000

Total = €125,000

[RESOURCES & VALUE FOR MONEY] How does the cost of the project represent value for money for the Cardano ecosystem?

Cardano can use this good news story to showcase its disruptive open source impact investing ethos and develop real-world solutions that can help fix the problems created & accelerated by fiat systems.

[IMPORTANT NOTE] The Applicant agreed to Fund10 rules and also that data in the Submission Form and other data provided by the project team during the course of the project will be publicly available.

I Accept