[IEO] Whole Earth Foundation (WEF)

[IEO] Whole Earth Foundation – Democratize Infrastructure Management.

#WholeEarthFoundation #WEC #IEO

SOLUTION

When we examine the world broadly, we see a growing issue of aging infrastructure. Unfortunately, service providers governing these infrastructure assets have not always adequately maintained and renewed the facilities they manage.

Problem

Imbalanced access to information between service providers and citizens

The lack of general incentive among parties to challenge the status quo

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.

The Envisioned Ecosystem

Among various infrastructure-related services with sustainability issues, the WEF will start first focusing on water. It is the most fundamental resource for all life and a critical resource for our society.

In December of 2020, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched the world’s first water futures contract to hedge against the rising water prices and manage water supply risk. However, this is only a temporary solution and does not solve the fundamental cause of water shortages. Furthermore, there is a risk that market transactions will prioritize profits over ensuring adequate availability of water and public access to it. On the other hand, the WEF approach encourages social change in waterrelated infrastructure through public participation. In a sense, we are not just providing a platform for people to participate in public affairs, but we are creating a new collective form of economic collaboration.

Future Projects

As its name implies, the “Whole Earth’’ Foundation intends to focus on all infrastructure & environment-related projects around the world. As a starting point, we are focusing on water topics, but potential uses of the platform extend far and beyond water infrastructure.

Building energy-efficient buildings is another potential area of application for the environmental database. Many startups in this space are pursuing innovative data-based solutions to improve energy efficiency. However, many of these companies are working with insufficient data. The data is disparate for each company, making it impossible to perform a holistic analysis and generate optimal results. The WEA database could unite this field by providing a place where environmental data related to a large number of buildings could be collected, curated, and shared by companies working in this field and building owners alike. The WEC creates an incentive for the companies to exchange and share this data, which typically would be kept private, thus benefiting all the companies.

Many organizations working to improve a broad range of infrastructure segments face similar challenges, limited by the availability or lack of a quality dataset ready for analysis. The Foundation plans to help these organizations as partners of the ecosystem by providing shared access to the database created by the WEF community.

Whole Earth Access (WEA)

Whole Earth Access (WEA) comprises the following three key groups:

1) Information Providers

Information providers (mainly general citizens) can access the environmental database and contribute data to earn utility tokens.

2) Infrastructure Service Providers

Infrastructure service providers can utilize the environmental database and tools created by third-party developers to improve development projects’ efficiency.

3) Partners

Partners can access the environmental database to develop novel tools that benefit the infrastructure and the environment, help publicize our project and vision to the world, and much more.

Token Allocation

The WEF’s mission is to “Democratize Infrastructure Management,” and it aims to bring about social change through citizens’ participation. Therefore, we believe that it is vital to have a significant portion of tokens allocated for the ecosystem. These tokens will be distributed out to the ecosystem participants in exchange for their efforts and contributions towards the growth of the environmental database.