Upe is a digital space for locals to share & syndicate community information. Information is publicly available for everyone on the main Upe platform (https://u.pe), the Upe forum (https://f.u.pe), and the Upe community digest (https://m.u.pe/d), all of which are live today and built using open source tech. The content on our platform is indexed and ranked in search engines so that more people outside our network can access and share community information.

Every community has its own page and forum, where they can coordinate and decide about which information will be public, and how it will be publicized.

While locals can steward local data, empowering the communities, someone who does not live in the neighborhood can get free local data about the weather, events, the area, etc, straight from locals.

However, community information about water, security, and other critical topics is often only shared in gated group chats. The Upe forum is now home to monthly town water consumption reports, annual beach clean up collection results, and community association meeting recaps, making this information publicly available to everyone.

It’s clear the community finds this information important as there are spikes in forum traffic on days when the link to that information is shared in the weekly community digest.

With hundreds of events being published on Upe every month, the Upe community digest has 1,000 local subscribers, continuously exceeds at a 50% open rate on a weekly basis, and the traffic to the digest landing page exceeds the number on our syndication list.

Anyone can sign up to post in our community forum, and verified users are eligible to have their information shared to Upe’s network. The Upe weekly digest now has a faithful following, and our community pages are featured in hundreds of rental properties, reaching property managers, hotels, and restaurants

Moreover, 30+ local impact makers, aka the Upe Kooks, are assembling to collaborate on projects, and share knowledge and connections. The Kooks are key community players. Every week, a new Kook is added to the fold, and announced in the community digest

Upe Deploys Local Quests

Upe has formed four types of local quests to steer the community towards fulfilling its mission of crowdsourcing, verifying and syndicating hyperlocal information:

• 🔦 Search Party - finds and verifies community info
• ⛴️ Ship It - syndicates community info
• 🪐 Space Maker - containerizes the Kooks and contributors
• 🌱 Oh Grow Up - grow the Upe network

Ok, UPE is cool, but what about Web3, the Ethereum Community, and ENS?

What we have:

1. A tested and validated framework to allow local communities to own and manage their data.

2. Three local communities are already using our framework with daily discussions and decisions in our forums.

3. A framework to integrate local businesses into a data economy together with the rest of the communities.

What we want to do:

1. Bring all our data on-chain in on Ethereum allowing REAL ownership for the communities.
2. Make our framework available to communities worldwide, and coordinate with mission-aligned projects.
3. Create a token economy that allows the communities to coordinate and benefit from all the value they are creating.

What we need (What the grant will be used for):

1. A team of Web3 experts (Devs, Token Engineers, Culture Builders, etc) to support our team in the mission of tokenizing our data.
2. Educational content and events about Web3 and DLTs customized for our communities.
3. Datathon so our communities can feel incentivized to bring their data on-chain and come up with new and innovative ways to interact with web3-native communities.

Thanks for taking the time to read it, and if you want to spark local ownership and stewardship of data by local communities, we can help you.

Please consider supporting us in our mission, any donation matters!