Upe Impact
Upe Impact bridges the gap between real-life community engagement and digital innovation by leveraging blockchain technology to enhance local information sharing and community collaboration.
Created on 12th June 2024
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Upe Impact
Upe Impact bridges the gap between real-life community engagement and digital innovation by leveraging blockchain technology to enhance local information sharing and community collaboration.
The problem Upe Impact solves
URL
Upe is a hub for communities in Costa Rica to crowdsource & share local information. We built Upe Impact to track impact data and celebrate locals who contribute to our collective mission & engage with NGOs providing IRL public goods. Our model can be replicated in any local community.
Mission & Milestones
Community information is fragmented & often only found in gated, private channels. U.pe is a hub for posting information in a public space for everyone to access: community events, water reports, beach cleanup results etc.
In the last year, Upe amassed:
- 2.2 million search impressions
- 80k unique users
- 1k subscribers
- 100+ contributors sharing local knowledge or volunteering at our IRL event
- 3 locations: Tamarindo, Playa Flamingo & Playa Grande
IRL
On May 25, Upe cohosted a carnival-themed fundraiser; NGOs operated game booths for a portion of the funds raised. The event drew 600 attendees, we sold 3000 game tokens & raised $3600 for 12 NGOs.
Coordination among local NGOs has improved:
- 2 organizations who met for the first time are collaborating on a new event
- 1 organization rescheduled an event to support another’s fundraiser
- Upe is cohosting another community fundraising event in August
IRL<>URL
For Onchain Summer, our local impact data is going onchain via Upe Impact. We've onboarded members, contributors & affiliated NGOs & local businesses to web3 with smart wallets. They claim badges (ERC 1155s) & receive attestations for Upe collaborations.
Our deliverables include:
- Launch Upe Impact on Base to bring contributions onchain
- Issue attestations using EAS
- Onboard members & NGOs with smart wallets to prepare them to claim Hypercerts
- Organize & cohost an August event with NGOs to capture more impact data and foster collaboration
- Onboard bounty seeking contributors to Coinbase Wallet
Challenges we ran into
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Introducing blockchain technology to local communities presents a challenge due to its steep learning curve. Instead of expecting locals to become web3 experts overnight, we worked with them by running experiments to gauge their tech capabilities and offer IRL collaboration opportunities. We've also held weekly off-chain votes to engage the community in decentralized decision-making.
Another major challenge we faced is with Hypercerts, which is currently undergoing a major upgrade, making it difficult to issue certs or claim fractions on Base Sepolia or any other chain. Therefore, our focus for Upe Impact is on creating a fun, seamless web3 onboarding experience for our members and we’ll issue Hypercerts later.
IRL
Building trust and establishing a reliable network of locals willing to contribute to crowdsourcing information was challenging. Rallying around the common goal of making hard-to-find information easily and publicly available was enough to synergize a dedicated following and contributors who care. We gained traction by attracting 1,000 subscribers to our weekly newsletter, distributing Upe into 500 rental homes and ensuring visibility in dozens of bars, restaurants, and retailers. To test our network's power, we hosted an IRL event without paying for digital marketing, relying solely on our network. We expected 200 attendees. Over 600 people showed up, demonstrating our community network's strength.
IRL <> URL
Integrating the URL and IRL poses a unique challenge as community-driven impact often goes under- or unreported. Volunteer burnout is real. By putting our contributor data onchain and making it easy, fun and rewarding, we are creating a real-world use case for using crypto as a coordination mechanism.
Upe is cohosting monthly IRL meetups with local NGOs to create more collective experiences to put more IRL community data onchain and prepare to make Upe Impact available to these organizations and more in the future.
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