As a citizen of the world, what do you care most about? The planet? Inclusivity? The place where you live? All of the above?
I was born in a relatively under-developed area of Tel Aviv, and stayed there for the first 20 years of my life. My father earned a living by operating a small convenience store selling soft drinks and sweets. My childhood and teenage years were infused with stories of neighbors who, despite their lack of means, joined together to get things done and make neighborhood life better. This made a profound impression on me.
As I grew older, I learned that people care about different things. My experience working with cities taught me that citizens are increasingly tuned into finding ways to make urban life better. It also taught me that city leaders everywhere are keen to promote new initiatives to improve urban life (such as supporting local businesses). Connecting the two brings the community together and makes it thrive.
For those of us who live in urban communities (villages, towns or cities) these urban spaces – and our interactions with the people in them – have a significant impact on our everyday lives. Most of us want to spend less time stuck in traffic, breathe cleaner air, have great neighbors, live close to friends and family whom we love. The pandemic has shown us the value of having a strong, engaged community on our doorstep, and reminded us that local involvement offers a powerful source of cohesion and renewal. So how can we tap into this source, to ensure communities evolve – and thrive?
Driving change that lasts
When you care about the planet, for example, you might want to promote sustainability, however, this word has all sorts of layers to it. It can mean daily recycling or reducing carbon emissions by walking or cycling (instead of driving). Or it can mean other actions that will ultimately help to save humanity. But it’s never enough to do it alone; change at scale needs collective action. You need your friends, family, neighbors and colleagues to take action too, and drive real change.
The key is to encourage people to do more than press the LIKE button on social media. This means taking people through the three layers of community engagement: from awareness, to expression of interest, to taking action. One of the most fulfilling ways of taking action is to join a social change movement – and tap into a groundswell of long-term engagement that generates a genuine sense of pride in accomplishment.
So let’s think about those communities on our doorstep. When it comes to improving life in urban spaces, getting residents engaged is crucial. The best recipe for engagement combines a good cause, incentive rewards and shared ownership. These three pillars look like this:
- A good cause encourages people to get involved, even when they’re constrained by time or resources.
- Incentive rewards remind people that their actions are valued, and repay them back for the time they invest.
- Shared ownership is a vital element to grow community connectivity and drive involvement.
Each of these pillars will, by itself, motivate a proportion of the community to participate. To scale community action, it’s important to tie in all three pillars of engagement.
When we began searching for the right technology to drive community engagement using these three pillars of engagement, it quickly became clear that blockchain technology was the go-to solution. Blockchain and cryptocurrency enable everyone who is active in the city, and helps make it a better place to live, to share the ownership of urban coins and reap the rewards of their success. Blockchain and cryptocurrency empower us to lay claim over our economies, participate in them, influence them, and enjoy the fruits of our labor.
At Urban Change, we believe locals are best positioned to understand local issues, inform changes in their own communities and realize local aspirations. Our goal of driving local community engagement is based on a simple principle: community engagement is the most powerful way for community members to drive change for the better in the cities where they live.
That’s how the Urban Change Protocol was born.
The goals of the Urban Change Protocol
At Urban Change, we believe the value of technology lies in transforming people’s lives – for the better. Now, using crypto technology, every urban community can harness its own local currency to generate tangible change in the day-to-day lives of the people who call it home.
The Urban Change Protocol is a decentralized system that directly connects to your community and empowers you to boost, and benefit from, your local economy. The protocol uses a two-coin model that helps communities balance two key elements of growth: stimulating the local economy and turning residents into active stakeholders with shared ownership of local prosperity.
These are the two coins used by the Protocol:
- The Local Coin is a daily-use, shopper-friendly cryptocurrency, pegged to the US dollar (or other FIAT), that residents can use to buy goods and services at local businesses. This Local Coin encourages residents to support community initiatives such as sustainability (by recycling) or diversity (by shopping at women-, minority- or Black-owned companies).
- The Impact Coin is an open-market cryptocurrency whose price is determined by supply and demand. Impact Coins can be used to earn voting privileges in the city (on future local initiatives, for example), can reward Coin holders with a higher financial incentive, or can confer off-chain benefits, like participation in exclusive local events. Ultimately, Impact Coins reflect the prosperity and level of social engagement of every urban community.
How does the two-coin model work?
Every urban community gets their own, community-branded set of Local Coins and Impact Coins.
Residents are rewarded with Local Coins when they take real action that benefits the community (such as recycling). When residents use the daily Local Coin to pay at local businesses, it triggers a unique mechanism called Proof-of-Stimulation. This results in the reward of Impact Coins to residents and to the community wallet. Holding Impact Coins is hugely beneficial to community members and enables them to accrue benefits in three different ways, as described above.
Sharing in prosperity
The magic of the Urban Change protocol is that its Proof-of-Stimulation creates a ‘cyclical’ solution that connects engagement and local economic stimulation. Put simply, it rewards residents according to their level of engagement (ie level of local stimulation). For every member who is active in the community, the higher their level of activity, the greater their level of shared ownership. The greater their ownership, the more active they become in the community – and the more they stimulate the local economy.
Shared ownership is a vital element when it comes to the (often challenging) goal of driving community involvement. Shared ownership in the community creates a strong, engaged group of people who are motivated to act and willing to participate in initiatives that promote good causes.
The two-coin model and the Proof-of-Stimulation enable the community to implement a system that combines the use of a shopper-friendly coin alongside a coin whose essence is shared ownership. Proof-of-Stimulation is fundamental to Urban Change. It offers a win-win cycle of engagement to drive local economic and social prosperity.
Plugging into the future
Urban Change Protocol connects the physical world (where we live) to the digital world, by linking our real-life, everyday actions to the crypto and blockchain universe. In addition, the protocol is a unique way to plug communities into the future of DeFi, without any complex technical action needed by them.
As an open-source protocol, Urban Change allows contributions from developers, enabling them to collaborate and share in its success. As a core contributor, I invite anyone who cares about the quality of urban life – city leaders, urbanists, residents – to join the effort to coin a new system for shared economic success, and make this a better world to live in. To find out more https://www.urbanchange.foundation.