❓The Challenge ❓ There are disconnects between the next billion users and today’s web3 tech–but where exactly are they, and how do we build solutions to prepare for the next wave? We need to start having conversations at the community level about what it will take for locals to acclimate and adopt. Upe is getting grassroots and granular to uncover the hangups, snags and pitfalls users face when it comes to local adoption of web3 tech in Costa Rica.

During our inaugural season, a group of 20+ locals magnetized under the common cause of crowdsourcing community information. Our first order of business was to get everyone a web3 wallet to track contributions. We incentivized them with badges that we explained will allow them to interact locally later. After several in person gatherings, we came to realize that every person was a custom case–their needs were all different. Most of our contributors who were new to crypto opted for a custodial wallet over a non-custodial one. Their reasons ranged from not having a safe place to keep a seed phrase, or afraid they would lose it, to concern the extreme elements would deteriorate the paper it was written on.

From our sample, we learned:

1. Very few people in our local communities hold crypto, and when they do, they can’t or rarely can use it locally.
2. For individuals, wallet ownership seems risky, and they’re afraid to act alone.
3. Signing messages proved challenging and scary, even for native English speakers.

🔥The Spark: Local Activities Fuel Community Adoption 🔥 Our communities of Playa Grande and Avellanas have hosted MetaCamp the past two years. At the last MetaCamp, we deployed a MiniQF (🔗 https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/10/0x35c9d05558da3a3f3cddbf34a8e364e59b857004) round and local staff received over $3k in donations. The Clean Wave issues POAPs for beach cleanup participants, and recently sold POAPs (🔗 https://checkout.poap.xyz/143299/) at their 6th Anniversary. We need more local use cases to showcase the impact of web3 tech and spark crypto curiosity.

In order for local adoption to occur, we need:

1. To onboard and educate users,
2. IRL and digital spaces to ask questions and have conversations,
3. Time to propagate and acclimate to new systems and tech, and
4. Authentic, supportive communities to demonstrate positive use cases.

💡The Proposed Solution💡 Upe believes there are enough people in the area to ramp up onboarding efforts. We are developing grassroots educational and engagement initiatives that offer hands-on web3 experiences. Additionally we are establishing community hubs for continuous learning and support, and issuing on chain attestations to those who participate.

In order to fulfill our mission to onboard and educate users, we need both physical and digital spaces for contributors to receive guidance and ask questions. We have the Upe Treehouse, our community hub located in central Tamarindo for IRL meetups; and a Discourse forum (🔗 https://f.u.pe) for our digital place to communicate, coordinate and share their experiences with web3. We are able to utilize both to host regular workshops where locals can learn about the basics of web3, crypto and its potential impact here in Costa Rica.

The community is also specifically interested in onboarding more local champions. We have a targeted list of influential, impact-driven individuals in our local communities who have a good understanding of technology. We are reaching out and coordinating with them to train them to be local web3 ambassadors.

Furthermore Upe hypothesizes that collecting community attestations will give locals a reason to be interested in creating and managing a wallet.

Upe is issuing on chain attestation to show proof of contribution for those who share valuable information about their local community, attend and complete onboarding web3 educational workshops, and participate in community enrichment activities. The Ethereum Attestations Service provides us a way to visualize our embedded local talent and data will be the storyteller of community impact.

We need the historical data of where we crowdsourced our information from to be in public view. By putting these attestations on-chain, we preserve the transparency of the work done, and can more efficiently iterate and build upon the narrative about more local community contributions.

By the end of Season 2 we will have completed another positive use case by collectively co-creating community information pages. Not only will our contributors have a wallet full of attestations, they will see the power of local community collaboration both in the physical and digital realm.

🌱 The Impact 🌱 Every new Upe Contributor creates a wallet to collect attestations for their contributions to the community pages, and therefore onboarding our community into the Ethereum ecosystem. By acclimating locals today, we can better position our community for the future.

Since we are working in a relatively intimate setting with hundreds of users in a targeted geo location, we are able to create feedback loops and iterate quickly.

As we bring new people into the ecosystem, we will continue to host IRL meetups, workshops and roundtable discussions to uncover the following:

1. Pain points and drop off points for users.
2. Local attitude and acceptance of crypto over time.
3. What makes crypto acceptable and embraceable.
4. Does crypto acceptance evolve through exposure.

By initiating onboarding efforts to web3 among the local population today, our community will be primed for adoption as more tech becomes available in the future.

💬 About the Upe Project 💬 Upe is empowering IRL communities of local changemakers and leveraging web3 technology to coordinate and deploy their ecosystem. Ultimately, Upe aspires to be the nucleus of a Latin American network of interconnected, self-sustaining, and empowered communities.

We are running a series of experiments to create a framework for contributors to coordinate, crowdsource and verify hyperlocal information. Locals needed a single, convenient place to aggregate and verify community information, so we bootstrapped Upe (🔗 https://u.pe) from open-source components to fulfill this void.

Each community in our area has different pain points, disconnects and blockages in regards to hyperlocal information sharing. For local context, the police have no landline, and the contact is a rotation of cell phone numbers. Trash pickup schedules fluctuate with no rhyme or reason. A comprehensive list of community events does not exist. In a coordinated effort to bring this information into the public eye, contributors in four local communities are synergizing to network, crowdsource and curate their community's living information. As we onboard new communities, we can observe the evolution of how these community pages differ in the information they decide to publish and share.

Season 2 experiment 🧪 is now in progress. We built a forum at the contributors request for a place to coordinate, and are using it to crowdsource the co-creation of four local community pages in Guanacaste, Costa Rica (read Season 2 Manifesto 🔗 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dWJ6luYNfLa4s4a24bKEZ0l4z1XDFRTu8BCg3Wu46o0/).

In addition to issuing attestations on chain for contributions, locals can complete bounties by providing hyperlocal information and/or inputting it on the Upe platform. Women and local Costa Ricans are the driving force of the current network effect for syndicating information, and we foresee this trend to carry over into Upe. The bounties for public service providers, community events, NGOs and community organizations is funded by a grant from Public Nouns (🔗 https://publicnouns.wtf/vote/20/).

Contributors choose between local gift certificates and crypto when redeeming their rewards. This interaction allows us to collect data about preferred redemption methods, which will give us a data set to measure acceptance and acclimation to crypto over time.

Local contributors collectively decide which businesses the Upe Community Chest purchases gift cards from. This gives us an opportunity to give the business the option to 1) receive 50% cash or 2) 100% of value in crypto. Like individuals, they will be issued attestations for their contribution to the Upe ecosystem, therefore giving us data about both contributions and acceptance rates of crypto over time. And also like individual contributors, we will onboard them to web3, are invited to workshops and into our local Upe community.

❣️ Why This Is Important ❣️ If these experiments continue to yield favorable results, the information stored on chain will be paramount in building a framework and toolkit for other local communities to bootstrap and steward their information. We know that we are not the only local community navigating similar challenges.

🌴 Follow Our Adventure 🌴 We are developing a weekly newsletter with updates on the exciting progress of this experiment. Look to follow us in real time on Lens @0xUPE.

🏆 Accomplishments & Partnerships 🏆 • Public Nouns grant (🔗 https://publicnouns.wtf/vote20/) • Collaboration with Costa Rica's Tourism Ministry (ICT) & ADI Tamarindo: (🔗 https://VisiteTamarindo.cr) • $3500 in Upe Community Chest donations from local businesses • Completed Season 1 Quest (🔗 https://hackmd.io/@0x3V3/SJfyk-t83) & Leaderboard (🔗 https://lookerstudio.google.com/reporting/59e7b1bd-64e4-4634-aefb-4a99b47dae9f) • Greenpill locally administered: MiniQF round at Metacamp - recipients included locals in Playa Grande (🔗 https://explorer.gitcoin.co/#/round/10/0x35c9d05558da3a3f3cddbf34a8e364e59b857004)

🧩 The Team 🧩 V4N | 📖the storyteller | content, UX, frontend dev, feedback loops

4d4n | 🖥️the dev | front- and backend dev, systems admin, hacker

AngryNative | 🗄️the biz | business ops, the breaker, the fixer, local community pillar

DBrick | 🎨the creative | graphic design, frontend dev, social media, community connector

Estefania | 💡the connector | outreach, marketing, word artist, content creator

Paul | 🌉the bridge builder | thought provoker, solution seeker, dev