LitterWeek Competition for schools

[GENERAL] Summarize your solution to the problem.

We are turning cleaning the planet into a game with Littercoin rewards. Our next campaign is the LitterWeek challenge, which will encourage societal adoption of our open source citizen science tools.

[GENERAL] Summarize your relevant experience.

Developing OpenLitterMap since 2008 and Littercoin since 2015. Worked as a divemaster in the tropics. After 15 years I got my first funding from catalyst.

[GENERAL] Requested funds in USD.

[IMPACT] 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.

[IMPACT] 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.

[IMPACT] 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.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

This will be an ongoing, iterative process that will last 12 months

Q1 (August - October): Developers hired and LitterWeek.org website online. Ready to accept school signups. We pilot this intervention in a few schools and use the feedback to improve our mission.

Q2: (November - January). Continue to build the marketing campaign for a big launch next year. Work with stakeholders and get ready for a big campaign in the Spring. We continue to work on our lesson plans, videos and educational materials for next year.

Q3: (February - April). Finishing touches for our school content. Partnerships finalised with community groups, local businesses and national corporate partners who want to be a part of this national campaign to clean up Ireland.

Q4: (May - July). In May, we have the official LitterWeek challenge and we livestream the results on instagram on a Friday at 3.55pm just before school finishes. The person who collected the most data in the week wins a new iPhone, and the winning school will receive prizes through our corporate partners (laptops, school tour, and more). For the summer months, we analyse the data and write a scientific paper that reviews the initiative.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Total Budget = $160,000 for 12 months

x1 UI/UX + Graphic Designer: $25,000 ($20/hour)

x1 Animator, Videographer, Youtube content creator $25,000 ($20/hour) 

x1 Community development + social media manager $25,000 ($20/hour)

x1 Senior frontend developer @ $50,000 ($25/hour)

x1 CTO + CEO = management, code review, full stack developer, business development, outreach, sales, marketing, scientific writing & more: $25,000

Budget for creating educational resources $10,000

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Founder - Seán Lynch

Senior Frontend Developer - Required

UI / UX - Required

Videographer + Animator: Potentially found

Community development + social media manager - Required

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Catalyst is the best funding instrument I have seen in my 15 years developing citizen science. Although central banks print an unlimited amount of fiat currency, they haven't printed any money to support the development of citizen science. Catalyst has already demonstrated that it can fix this by supporting our first successful proposal in Fund 4. Significantly more work needs to be done and we will definitely be back to develop a range of other initiatives.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

We will continue to provide an improved cost breakdown on google spreadsheet for every spend.

We will complement this with a monthly report on team, progress, updates and expenditure that will become a landmark project for transparency on Catalyst.

There will be open access to every invoice & proof of funds at all times.

Included in the monthly report will be a link to each significant github commit which you can already review on github.com/openlittermap

We already host a weekly community call, followed by a weekly blog post about our progress. We will be able to complement this with weekly edited videos showcasing our progress and community development.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

In addition to our other proposals

• Littercoin: Mass Adoption (https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/418047)
• Open Source Citizen Science development (https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/418985)

We will create the most comprehensive national baseline dataset by citizen scientists that has ever been created.

Students in Ireland will get their first experience with citizen science.

We will quantify how this intervention improved people's perception of their ability to be a part of collective environmental solutions and publish these results in a journal.

This study will be able to be repeated elsewhere.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

We got our first funding in Fund 4 ($50,000) which helped debug openlittermap, add many new features, and help shape the tokenomics and future steps to develop the entire ecosystem.

In addition to software development, we need improved marketing campaigns that can increase user adoption and solve the challenges we want to fix.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

OpenLitterMap covers 16/17 SDGs

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