Whole Earth Foundation — Approach
To address this problem, the Whole Earth Foundation (WEF) proposes to utilize the Whole Earth Access (WEA) platform to connect general citizens (or information providers) and infrastructure service providers by providing access to a database containing detailed information about their infrastructure, and an ecosystem designed to facilitate communication and collaboration.
At its core is the environmental database, constructed by pooling together and geoprocessing multiple public and privately available data sources. Once normalized, the data will undergo additional processing to be made available in very high geographical resolution, which is not available in most publicly available datasets today. The data is also pre-cleaned, helping shorten the development time for machine learning projects by third-party developers. Information providers can interact with this data through a UI (e.g., mobile app), enabling them to stay informed about the infrastructure’s status around them, thereby helping alleviate the imbalance of information between them and the infrastructure service providers.
Furthermore, in addition to having access to data, citizens can actively support the database and, consequently, maintain the underlying infrastructure. A commonly shared limitation among existing environmental databases is the slow renewal of information — an average of 1–5 years of wait time. The WEA platform expects to address this by crowdsourcing data collection; Participants of the ecosystem will contribute data to help maintain an up-to-date database that infrastructure service providers can use to make better-informed decisions. Gamification mechanisms such as Quests will be explored to motivate participant engagement.
Participants will earn a blockchain-based token (Whole Earth Coin, hereafter WEC) for the provision of high-quality data, enabling a free and open marketplace that allows for the creation and efficient exchange of important data.
This approach is expected to help establish a system that promotes regular maintenance and renewal of infrastructure while raising the general citizens’ interest in the topic. As the public’s interest further grows, this momentum will accelerate the establishment of a society where citizens actively collaborate with institutions in joint-effort projects geared towards environmental improvement.
Whole Earth Foundation Community
Website: https://wholeearthfoundation.org/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WholeEarthFdn
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/WholeEarthFoundation/
Telegram: https://t.me/WholeEarthFoundation
