Gamifying Littercoin

Several people are creating an account on OpenLitterMap.com every day to help map and collect data on litter and plastic pollution. 

OpenLitterMap is an open source, interactive, and accessible database of the worlds litter and plastic pollution. We are creating a data collection experience combined with an incentive to help unlock societies largely unexplored data collection capacity.

By doing the work, our global users are passively mining Littercoin. Not only is Littercoin the first token rewarded for collecting data about the environment, but it is designed to be the easiest way to get started with crypto as users don't need to part with cash or sign up to an exchange. Littercoin will also not be listed on any exchange. It is a non-tradable token that can be spent in zero-waste stores only.

Thanks to Fund 4 (https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Littercoin-Mass-Adoption/340301-48088), which is still in progress, we have debugged and improved our app and we are now transitioning from the age of debugging to the land of new features. Fund 4 will end with a hugely improved app and the Littercoin token.

You can see a full breakdown of our Fund 4 funding report here. Notice there are 2 tabs. (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OWy_bXu9Eeh7bSA0KLarP9TSQg7XJKKqPMGxiRTbAFk)

Using our app works and its getting better, but it is uneventful and missing a captivating gaming experience which is necessary to achieve mass adoption.

We have several plans to improve the gamification of our app that we need your help with. If you want to read about how to onboard many new people into the ecosystem, read on.

1. LitterWeek. This is a new week-long competition for schools + corporates to join a challenge to see who can collect the most amount of data in a week. Instead of doing this in 1 specific week of the year, it is a rolling challenge that you or your organisation can take any week that suits you. At the end of the school year, we will have an awards ceremony and stream the results live on Instagram. We need help building a new website, with improved real-time leaderboards, and more. We have a partnership with UCD to implement this, who are already piloting it in 3 schools across Ireland, and have existing links to 100s of more schools who are looking for outdoor, covid-friendly, environmental and fun technological activities. We have also recently partnered with Sky Ireland who trained several of their employees as ambassadors and we have 2 more corporates who have contacted us who want to get involved when the app is improved and the time is right. This will bring OpenLitterMap into the hands of many people who will be introduced to passively mining Littercoin and brought into the local circular economy. Our combined effort will result in the first map and baseline dataset of litter and plastic pollution in my native Ireland which is ready to be exported to the rest of the world.

2. LitterStrike. Heard about ClimateStrike? Join the LitterStrike. This is our global day of action. Let's empower millions of climate protestors with citizen science to start using their devices to map plastic pollution and litter in their communities. This work can be commemorated with LitterNFTs - the first tokens rewarded for environmental activism.

3. The Game. To improve the in-game experience, we are going to unlock awards, and guide the user through the biodiversity of life. As user levels up, they will evolve from a single-cellular plankton in the ocean and learn about the impact that plastic has on various species along the way. Think of it like Pokémon Go for your local clean up group. We have yet to exploit one of our biggest competitive advantages which is that we grew up playing online games, which many senior researchers trying to facilitate citizen science today did not enjoy and do not understand. There is a huge generational disconnect with how citizen science is being facilitated by institutions today and we have the know-how to meet the technological expectations that the young people of today expect and deserve. Got some ideas about how to improve this process? We want to hire a gamification expert to help us create the game of the decade.

4. LitterNFTs. These will commemorate data collection achievements (eg. first user to achieve 100,000xp globally and per country), unusual findings, and represent participation in scientific papers. We want our LitterNFTs to become the most collectable items in crypto.

Timeline: 
1 month: New graphic designer + gamification lead join the team and start prototyping our next products.

3 months: LitterWeek website online and accepting many school + corporate team signups. Will you join a team or play by yourself in Legendary mode?

6 months: Launch LitterStrike campaign, our global day of action for citizen science. Let's incentivise the global climate strike movement to map pollution and shop in zero waste stores.

12 months: LitterWeek year 2 begins with more school, corporate and university partnerships.

Budget Breakdown:
15% Graphic Designer, Animator + Videographer. Have someone ready for the position.

15% Story development, gamification lead to work with the graphic designer

40% Software development for LitterWeek + LitterStrike websites and integrate gamification story + awards.

15% Creation and development of LitterNFTs

15% Overheads, extra costs, misc.

We want Littercoin to become a flagship project on Cardano. This is an important innovation that solves 2 important barriers to the adoption of crypto as users do not need to part with cash or sign up to an exchange. Just download our app, walk outside, and start collecting data. Every day, more people are downloading our app and empowering themselves with data collection. All around the world, 100s of millions of people have been equipped with incredibly powerful handheld supercomputers that can collect data but we have yet to scratch the surface of what this unprecedented human potential is capable of. By combining our data collection experience with an incentive, we can bring to harness this emerging global human potential and begin to incentivise the most rapid production of global data the world has ever seen. We are bringing the world together but we need your help to bring this to the next stage which we want to become a landmark citizen science project that people will be writing about and contributing to for years to come until we get a handle on the pollution destroying our planet.

If you want to see what academics have to say about our work, see openlittermap.com/references

Drop me a message anytime you want to talk about openlittermap, citizen science, littercoin or plastic pollution.

Thank you for reading this proposal and hope you give it some votes!! ^^