Urbánika’s Climate-Positive Bus

A traveling showroom for regenerative tech and a school for neighborhood coordination all in a 🚍

Versión en español acá

What you’ll find in this grant

1. TL;DR
2. Climate-positive design specs
3. Updates from past round,
4. Goals for this season (August-December):

LFGrow!!🌻

⌛ TL;DR

Donating to Urbánika's grant will result in turning the bus you helped buy into a Climate-Positive Bus, showcasing sustainable solutions for communities.

By donating, you will support the creation of a fully functional regenerative tech showroom on the bus. This means that the traveling school will not only teach about neighborhood coordination using web3 tech but it will also promote eco-friendly practices for homes, schools, offices, and shops.

While the bus is designed and transformed, Urbánika will take a pilot neighborhood into the journey of becoming a Commons and a DAO. Below you can find all the details about this and the progress obtained until now.

Join Urbánika in its mission to accelerate the transition to a climate-positive future by donating to this grant and sharing it with others. Together, we can make a lasting impact!

📐 Climate-positive design specs

The Climate-Positive design specifications are found here.

🤲🏽 Updates from the last round,

We have several ones. Here is the list:

1. The bus,
2. A Foundation,
3. New course,
4. Alliances are forming,
5. Neighborhood pre-validation.

🚍 The bus,

We bought the bus!! It was a rabbit hole on its own. We were considering buying a “normal” school bus shipped from USA, but then we found that México was one of the top worldwide producers of urban and tourism buses through a public company named DINA. Then it was privatized and Volvo bought it.

We found out that many bus drivers loved the model Dorado from the DINA company. So we searched for that one, and boom! we found it at a cheaper price, closer to us, larger in size, and with a better motor than the USA option we had chosen before.

Here is the bus your donations made possible to get:

🏦 A Foundation,

Looking for a foundation is not an easy task. The ideal foundation should be one whose purpose is to realize Latin American cultural, political, and economic change with planetary regeneration in mind.

We offered the Bus to three foundations that met these criteria. Two didn't reply. We were told by some other people working in NGOs that the bus might be an administrative and legal load.

However, the Botin Foundation is interested in looking for ways to keep us publicly accountable while not having the extra workload of owning the bus.

The Botin Foundation has a wide network of 22 Latam countries and more than 400 people on the ground working on public service, NGOs, and civic activism. We are happy to announce that from September on we will be discussing with them the ways to:

• Get invited directly by Municipal Councils, Chambers of Commerce, and Universities, from the cities we’ve on the roadmap, to host climate-positive and neighborhood coordination workshops and conferences for them.
• Reach specific neighborhoods that they already have identified where active changemakers live in each of the 40 cities we're visiting.
• Reach the NGOs they’ve curated that are working on public goods and commons within these 40 cities.

Basically, the Botín Foundation already has the information and the people on the ground. It's a natural alliance.

We are very happy because this alliance increases the possibilities of creating upward spirals that facilitate the cultural, economic, and political change we need.

📚 New course,

Initially, the idea was to promote the courses we already developed, but these courses are too complete: They go from zero to DAOist regarding blockchain usage for impact communities and from zero to Commoner regarding PostCapitalism.

We validated that while those courses are necessary and highly appreciated by the people taking them…

The time it takes to learn them all is too demanding for a regular neighbor that just wants to solve the coordination failure she shares with the rest of the people living on the same street…

So!

We are taking the courses we have and simplifying them into a new course in which examples and challenges are completely focused on the neighborhood context. This new course is the one we are taking to each of the 40 cities we’re visiting.

We will still promote the complete courses for those who are interested in going deep into the postCapitalism and Blockchain4Good rabbit hole :)

🤝 Alliances are forming,

At the course level: We’ve included a module on Conflict Resolution tailor-made by the one and only JuanK Bell from Gravity DAO! We are very happy about it and we’ve also included on our website their most updated full course to become a Graviton (Conflict Resolution Moderator). Completely FREE!!

Register now on our website.

At the bus level: Are you part of a regen solution? DM us! Let’s join efforts so neighborhoods, NGOs, municipal councils, universities, and chambers of commerce start adopting the regen way! 🌱🌻

✅ Neighborhood pre-validation,

The neighborhood association of Real del Bosque, in Querétaro, México was so happy and grateful about having a neighborhood coordination school and climate-positive showroom that they are helping us with the process of getting the approval from all neighbors, which requires more than 1200 houses to approve!

Also, they’ve said that after covering the neighborhood they can put us in contact with the Municipal Council to take the school to other neighborhoods too. We’ll see, it looks like there’s a validation of the need and desire to learn and apply a postCapitalist mindset.

🎯 Goals for this season (August-December):

🏗️🌻 Turning the bus into a Climate-Positive Bus

This endeavor is itself a highly complex project. It requires many specialized people, and we got this!

Here you’ll find the process we are stepping into:

1. 🏆 Choosing the architect together: a contest

We’ve launched this tally form in Spanish to attract architects from Latin America to participate in a contest to design the bus in the most climate-positive way. We’ve sent it to a couple of universities, activist groups, and obviously to the public eyes of both Facebook and Twitter.

Help us share it with your Spanish-speaking frens!

The contest only requires a motivation letter, a CV or portfolio link, and the price the architect or group of them would charge for the job.

• 🥇 How are we choosing the winner?

Together, everyone who has donated to Urbánika on the past Alfa and Beta rounds and that has minted its corresponding hypercert, will be able to vote.

We will open a voting session from the 4th to the 10th of September at our Charmverse. There you will be able to vote for the candidates that applied.

• 👤 How would you know them?

We will post their candidatures on our Twitter and Lenster pages, so you can check them out, and with your vote decide which architect will pass to history by designing the first postCapitalist traveling school in the most climate-positive way that the budget allows.

2. ✍🏽 Designing the bus

The chosen architect(s) will be paid 25% upfront so they design the general architectural draft. At delivery, they’ll get 25% to work on the definitive architectural project. Then, the remaining 50% will be paid milestone-based, so at each major delivery of both the design and actual transformation of the bus, they’ll be receiving the payment.

The whole process, from the contest to the plans, payments, and actual building is already being stored in Urbánika’s GitHub repo through a Creative Commons 0 license. The idea is that others can take it, remix it, and use it for building other SolarPunk / Climate-Positive buses, houses, schools, and offices!😉

• 💰 What’s the budget?

Our research says that it’ll be about $15-$25K. But, we will start with whatever we raise here. A $2 USD or more donation will greatly help us reach this budget.

The plan is to have a completely functional showroom of what a house, school, office, or shop needs to implement in order to catch and treat its own water, use solar energy, produce biogas and biodiesel from waste, and its own food, following an open-knowledge, cosmo-local, and circular economy thinking.

Also, we are looking for sponsorships from other regen champs that share our values and want to put their solutions in the eyes and minds of the people we are reaching. If you have a regen solution contact us!

• 🤔 What if the budget is not enough?

You know the answer. We’ll fundraise more, and we’ll start with what we have. We are on a momentum. Let’s keep it going! Pls, support accelerating the transition ahead!

3. 👷🏽‍♀️ Working on the transformation

We expect the transformation to take from October to January.

🏘️ Training the pilot neighborhood

The bus conversion already takes a lot of time, but it is useless without the school approach. So parallelly, we are working on:

1. 📖 Finishing the simplified course for neighbors. We expect that by mid-October, the whole course will be finished.
2. ✅ Get the approval to park and work on the bus at the Real del Bosque neighborhood. We expect that by the end of August, we have it!
3. 🎓 Turn that neighborhood into a Commons and a DAO. This process goes from planning and running a campaign to registering neighbors as apprentices, then co-defining the best times to take the course, starting the course, defining the top shared problem, working on it, and finally graduating them as neighborhood assambleists.

Important Note: Neighbors are graduating once and only they turn their chosen problem into a solution that uses commoning, peer governance, and self-sustaining methods while using a Gnosis safe as common treasury, a Charmverse as a governance forum, an ENS of each neighbor's address as a token-gating mechanism, and both Giveth and Gitcoin to fundraise.

Then, they will be able to replicate the process on another problem, and we will be there accompanying this second process, but without interfering, just supporting them as they request it.

4. 🆙 Get feedback & improve the training. As we will be in the same neighborhood from October to January, we will be able to benefit from closed feedback loops, and quickly iterating solutions so we are ready for the upcoming neighborhoods of the 40 cities we’ve on the roadmap.

🗺️ Plan the trip ahead

By the end of 2023, we will have enough data and experience to prepare for the trip ahead. This includes:

1. Developing an ambassador program and PR campaign that attracts neighbors to invite us to their neighborhood and take responsibility for registering at least 10 apprentices and obtaining the approval for us to arrive and stay in the neighborhood for the 2 weeks that the training last.
2. Developing a PR campaign with the Botin Foundation to reach key changemakers in each city that are capable of boosting upward spirals toward climate-positive living.
3. Reviewing (adding or re-prioritizing) the cities we are visiting: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1T130WIoSgw3p0WeSKKr5Tks06IBxrNU&usp=sharing

LFGrow! 🌱🌻

If you’ve reached here is because you are genuinely interested in making this happen, right?

The team working on Urbánika is putting the time and soul into making this happen. The grant money is not paying for our time, it's entirely used in funding the traveling school to accelerate the transition ahead. So, please remember that more than $1 helps a lot to boost the QF match.

Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions or want to collaborate, please reach out through a Twitter DM or an email to humberto.besso@protonmail.com

Oh! Before you leave…

If you are a donor & a grantee, the best of luck to you too.

Send us a DM with your grant’s link. We will check it out. We promote others making a real impact too, and because we are part of the SolarPunk Guild we host the Gitcoin Radio, so if you are building for the common good, we would love to invite you to a session.

If you are a donor, thank you for reaching this point. Consider attending the Gitcoin Radio sessions, you will get to know other great projects and we will have several sessions in Spanish too.