The Public Space Access Grid
Geo-tracking is already used to monitor people and create personas to market to them. But what if we actually used geo-tracking anonymously so that it doesn't invade the privacy of people yet can still provide benefits to the person and the communities they live in. This project aims to find a suitable privacy preserving technology and platform to enable decentralized location based products and services.
The Challenge
Currently geo-tracking is used by tech giants and large corporations for “your convenience”. Consumers give access to location data in their phones to use apps. Most of the time, this is done unknowingly. These data points are collected and used to build a profile on the consumer and track their behavior and movements. Some of it is convenient. Google maps can tell you if there’s an accident ahead and reroute you to a faster route. Weather apps can you flash flood or tornado warnings. Target and Walmart know when you are within 400 meters of the store and can gather your pick-up items and have them ready outside as soon as you pull up. A lot of it is not for convenience, but to build a profile on you and sell off your information. This is a very profitable business and interestingly enough, the consumer gets zero in return for their own information.
We also see this technology being very useful in local communities if done properly. Most communities have limited funding and antiquated methods for judging community needs. This leads to allocating their limited resources to a few projects of speculative interest all funded by tax payer money that do not know that this is where their money is going. We suspect that many community members would be happy to support community projects that match their interests and if their was a clear budget, transparent process, and roadmap or set expectations. There also could be a system for rewards given to the community members for participation in making the community better. We have segmented four different use cases for potential areas we believe this technology would be beneficial.
The Vision
Team Zero believes the path forward either pays the consumer for information, allows the consumer to control what types of data a service is allowed to have, can take back that information, or can simply stay anonymous throughout any experience. Team Zero is also looking into how this technology may keep consumers anonymous, but also reward them in their own communities for participating in local experience. We also have a vision that will allow more voice in how communities allocate money or operate. We are looking for more efficient ways to improve local communities and be able to gauge the effectiveness and satisfaction of its citizens. Here's a few examples of how this might works.
Public Parks
Enable city and local governments to manage access to public parks. This technology would allow the creation of PassZones in parks and nature preserves to limit the number of people, charge for access, or improve budgeting for resources. It could be setup for temporary events such as festivals and outdoor markets. It could also be setup for longer term for trails, fields, natural areas.
CommunityEngagement
"Your-Town-Here" rewards programs with Citizen Tokens! Setup rewards programs for their citizens to encourge usage of the parks, recreational areas, and community grounds that are paid for by tax dollars. “Citizen tokens” can be assigned to people who visit requently. Those tokens can be used to buy or use perks (e.g. free kayak rental after 10 visits to Lake Wallenpaupack).
Local Business
Local businesses can offer incentives based on GeoPass token holders and those with certain levels of “Citizen tokens”. This ties in revenue from local business (tax dollars) to local governments and creates a positive feedback loop for everyone involved. Better businesses, better revenue, better parks, happier citizens.
Construction
Site access management and tracking.
Have We Crossed Paths?
A bit more of a novelty use case, "Have We Crossed Paths" was based on an idea that the world is really smaller than we realize. We are simply not aware of each other in different stages of our lives. This doesn't mean we didn't share and enjoy the same experiences. It would be interesting to be able to allow access to 2 people's geo-coordinates throughout a lifetime and see if their positions were ever close to each other, where, and when.
Our Approach
We're currently looking into each area, researching, contacting people in the industry, and performing small experiments. If you are interested in learning more about how we explore, please check this out (link to how we work)
Experiments
We have not performed any experiments yet for this project.
Brian Chamberlain
Founder, Engineering
Brian has been building consumer web and mobile products since 2000. Now in the Web3 space he is looking to bring his product engineering skills to the distributed web. His interests are in protocol development, applied cryptography, decentralized storage, hardware and software prototyping.
T.J. Chmielewski
Founder, Product Design
T.J. specializes in defining successful products and experiences, building effective prototypes and tests, and improving product development processes through collaboration. :)