1. TL;DR:

• Climate positive bus
• Urbánika's Research
  2. Challenges
  3. Mechanical report
  4. Architectural plans and the climate-positive devices
  5. Budget
  6. We are looking for you!
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1. TL;DR 👀

This grant includes two initiatives. On one side the climate positive bus, which is both a school and house, and the Web3 Neighborhood Governance program which aims to facilitate the emergence of smart cities that are peer-governed and regenerative by design.
👇🏽

🚌 Climate-positive bus

You may already know about our bus. If not, here's a brief description plus some key updates about its progress.

What's the bus for? It aims at two goals: 1) Become a climate tech showroom to immerse public and private decision makers into adopting regenerative technologies and practices, and 2) Facilitate the emergence of self-managed, regenerative, and smart cities.
The bus is so massive that it attracts people and its setu up facilitates a learning and playing environment where everything is possible.

Where are we now? The bus has been slowly advancing. Lots of challenges came up (see Challenges section), but nothing can't stop us. We have achieved the following:

• 🔌 The Solar electric installation (wires, tubes, and lights, not FVP). After three weeks of negotiations, it is finally underway.
• 🚰 The biofilter system. The 9 Viento architects and Humberto attended a biofilter specialization course at PermaFest 2024. There we strategized the best way to implement the system on the bus. We are grateful with Hombres de Maiz and [9 Viento] (https://www.facebook.com/9VientoArquitectos/) because they granted us dedicated time to make the design feasible for the bus.
  The biofilter system will allow us to reuse the bus' water again and again with only an annual 8% loss! Not being enough great, water will be completely drinkable! We expect that by July we have it installed. Next github update of plans will come in May.
• 🚽 The biodigester was discarded. After months of research, we arrived to GIRA, a research center of eco technologies. There, we found out that although the biodigester fits in the bus and will work as we expected, it is no feasible due to its weight. The biodigester requires us to drive with one extra ton of water plus all the solid waste we feed it. That's too much weight. However, we found another solution: autocontained dry toilets. They are expensive to buy, but not that expensive to make, so we'll make one and test things like: time of degradation based on ventilation, temperature, composting materials (ash, sawdust, worm hummus, mushrooms and bacteria, and a mix of everything), oddor, time to empty, and maintenance practices. We will have fun experimenting. We will be reporting on Twitter our experiences; and maybe a Creative Commons design can come out of it :)
• 🏫 School infrastructure. We bought five tables, 15 chairs, a Wanbo projector, a white wall for the projector, and some lights. We've already used them to provide workshops and conferences during the Eth Cinco de Mayo. Next expense will be the tent where to provide the classes outside the bus.
• 🌞 A set of solar panels was offered to us by Helios. We are very grateful for their offer and looking forward to receiving and installing them.
• ♻ Decontaminated plastic to diesel and furniture. We've agreed with Chucho of ReFi Tulum and PetGas to collab on two things:
  • ⛽ Diesel production. Chucho has taken the commitment to pushforward a smaller design of the PetGas machine. The goal is to show that gasoline, diesel, and other commercial products can come from plastic waste. Seeing the machine that generates the diesel the bus uses will help municipalities and transport collectives to understand an attractive way of implementing circular economy.
  • 🪑 Furniture. We are aiming to make some of the bus furniture from recycled plastic. The first iteration are the bus' glasses. Thanks to the Nouns Amigos community we got the funds to build a giant pair of Noggles (Nouns goggles). The ReFi Tulum team leads several SolarPunk awareness dynamics, one of these is engaging tourists and locals to recover plastics from the beaches to later show them in what things "waste" can be turned into, such as in our Noggles. Once we receive the glasses we will assess which other pieces of furniture will be made using this method. With this we aim to show that circular economy has many appliances that also look great.
• 🧰 Mechanical repairs. We took the bus to ETH Cinco de Mayo, and there we found out that the bus had several critical mechanical failures. We repaired most of them and took note on the ones we have yet to repair. Check the mechanical section if you want to learn more about this. Also, if you are willing to replicate what we did, DM us, we have a ton of lessons to share!
• 🤝🏽 Alliances. We made a trip to the Ecotechnologies Research Unit. There we found out that there are two universities trying too to build a climate positive mobile house! We shared them our Github which contains the design plans and the list of materials used so far. We shared lessons and they shared with us that they have already built an eco technologies catalog for building climate positive houses along with a methodology to choose the best ecotechnology depending on different factors such as weather, cultural needs, and others. This is what we wanted to create after building the bus, so it's great that they already have it. We will be sharing this with every city where we arrive so to foster the transition to climate positive living.
• 🛣 LatAm tour. We created the volume 1 of the Regen Book. This is a photobook album with the regen projects that were in the top of our minds and that we find key to share throughout our trip. Volume 1 was already shared within the Eth Cinco de Mayo hackathon and most recently, during a presentation Humberto gave at Universidad Veracruzana. If you were not in Volume 1, reach us out via DM, we will start Volume 2 soon.

📺 Stay tunned to our Instagram, X, and Farcaster accounts (@Urbanika), we will be posting videos from inside and a deep explanation of the eco technologies.

🏘 Web3 Neighborhood Governance program

Urbánika has outlined a scientific research approach to carry out the DAOification process of neighborhoods with which we have applied to several research grants:

• 🐖Summer of Protocols: https://forum.summerofprotocols.com/t/improving-decision-making-protocols-within-neighborhoods/564
• ⛓Ethereum Foundation Academic Fellowship: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-utxdiJ03zqRhujTNquLwFMolvYFHe-NhhESWugzmn4/edit#heading=h.s8nha0y6sckp

🎯 Research goals

1. Understand how a neighborhood can become a DAO, and,
2. Co-produce interfaces and experiences together with the actors involved in the neighborhood governance.

Together, these two goals seek to ease the adoption of DAOs as a cyber-physical environment for collaborative and coordinated action.

The research follows a constructive approach, which means we are creating artifacts that can be tested by us and by others to advance the DAO and Smart City knowledge fields.

Within Querétaro, there's a Neighborhood Association called Real del Bosque. They have accepted to go through the DAO facilitation program. Most likely when this round is live, we will have kick started the program.

👐🏽 Who will this research initiative cover?

We are exploring a polycentric governance approach where municipal officers, private service providers, neighbors, and neighborhood association representatives participate as they are requested depending on the type of proposal.

🗺 Where will this research happen?

This applied research will be carried out first in México within three cities: Querétaro, Monterrey, and Chetumal. These cities will take us a year of work, after it, the research journey will be extended to a four-year period covering different cities in LatAm.

From carrying out the first year of research an open knowledge methodology for DAOifying urban communities will be delivered. This methodology will be available under a Creative Commons license within our dedicated Github repository.
The repository will include the open source interfaces and the insights each neighborhood provided. We have been invited to write about this research journey within the Handbook of Blockchain in Public Governance, which will be launched in 2025.

💻 Which tech stack are we including within the neighborhood governance workshops?

• Decentralized Identity (Smart Wallets for DID creation with Candide, and DID managers like Gitcoin Passport, Holonym)
• Attestations (EAS, POAPS, and Hypercerts)
• On-chain delegation (Hats protocol)
• eForum and decentralized project management (Charmverse and DeWork)
• Fundraising and allocation (Gitcoin and Giveth, and SAFE)

Additional to the cyber-physical peer governance facilitation we are providing workshops on the commons and SolarPunk retrofitting (implementing eco technologies and DePIN iniatiatives), movie nights, and serious games that bring up awareness like Game Changers: the game and CommonsPoly.

🏆 Research team.

The research team is currently composed of a post-doctoral advisor in Public governance, a PhD in Economics, a Master in the Science & Arts of eGovernance and public sector innovation, an Architect specialized in Urbanism, and two Fron-End engineers. We are excited about the team and the potential research outcomes which will definitely lead to enriching both the DAO and Smart cities knowledge fields.

2. Challenges 🚧

The bus' roof was rotten. Yes, rotten. It costed about 4K USD to repair it. That was entirely out of scope. Read the post about it.

Mechanical. Several repairments were carried out and about 1.4K USD have gone in this section. This doesn't account for the tools bought, trips, time, and gray hairs that we have gone through. Humberto entered a Diesel mechanics course to learn how to repair issues in the future.

High price quotation from providers. One of our providers was charging too much for a job. We rejected it, brought other providers quotation, and after several weeks of negotiation we managed to reduce the budget about 1.7K USD.

Lack of permaculture or environmental background. We are learning on the way, and we are happy to do so. Everytime we share about the topic it produces light in the eyes of the people we talk to. We are sure that a climate positive house on wheels and a school that promotes a commoning culture of peer governance and regenerative practices is key to transition toward regenerative and decentralized smart cities.

Time. Maybe you don't know it, but Urbánika is entirely managed by Humberto Besso Oberto H. So even small and obvious tasks such as tweeting or sharing our experiences takes a time toll. Just recently the research time was composed and we are still open to contributions, specially if your skills are in media, documentation, or communication, please help us spread the word of city DAOs and regen tech.

Closed communication channels to researchers and commercial providers of eco technologies. It's so dumb! They don't sale or reach to market because they don't attend the calls nor emails, instead, they require a local visit.
Closed patents like this and no way to contact the researchers behind their patent makes their research useless. And what's even more wrong is that most of these researchs are financed by public budget. This is just one example of many more...
Calling and mailing universities and researchers has given us a zero result. We have dedicated several weeks and hundreds of emails and calls to different researchers, providers, and universities, and no one answers. And when we visited one researcher at their research center, he said: "Sorry. I have 54 missed calls just today, I'm busy with my activities, I can't answer to all of them." Can you imagine that? When we asked the secretary of the university why she didn't answer our calls she just smiled. LinkedIn does not work to contact these people, we need a better and more open way to contact professionals. If you are an entrepreneur take this as a signal of something that could greatly benefit climate and social impact.

Nothing will stop us. Everything is a lesson to us, and if you or someone else is going to carry out a regenerative nomad way of living, DM us, we will gladly share all our experience so far.

3. Mechanical report 🧰

Things done:

• The clutch was adjusted but still needs to be changed for a new one in the future.
• The break system (which works with air) seemed like a Gruyere cheese (full of holes). We patched the entire air break system and fixed the air generation machine.
• The windshields were changed (they were broken).
• The gear stick was worn out, which made very difficult to drive it, but now it will be working for other 30 years.

Things to do:
The wires of the bus seem like a knot and are in bad condition. They need to be changed and put together in their right place.
The dashboard needs to be changed.
The batteries and their wires are also in a bad condition.
The suspension and the springs need to be fixed/changed.
A complete chassis cleanup and new grease.

Thanksfully, Humberto's peers in the CEGADI mechanic school have gifted us with some tools, their time to repair some parts, and share lessons. Big thanks to them!

4. Architectural plans and the climate-positive devices 📐

You can find all the plans we have in our GitHub here: https://github.com/Urbanika/PositiveClimate_Bus/tree/main/Planos arquitectónicos y equipo

In the upcoming weeks we will have the plans and budget for the biofilter and rain water harvester, then we will proceed with the

5. Budget 💰

We learned that separating our grants do not help as matching multiplier get diluted. So this time we are applying to only one round and distributing everything we get in the following way:

• 60% climate positive bus. To finish the bus as soon as possible.
• 30% neighborhood governance research. To kickstart the neighborhood research while we get dedicated funding for it, and hire someone to carry out the documentation and sharing of the bus and research initiatives.
• 10% for coordination efforts. To pay Humberto for coordinating both initiatives.

6. We are looking for you! 👈🏽

Thanks for staying until here. Now please take a moment and imagine with us the following:

Imagine that your city can follow a broad but clear enough methodology to:

• decentralize its governance and facilitate its whole process from proposal making to voting and executing,
• automate processes with IoT and web3 that reward participants and the city itself with a co-owned QF budget tagged for urban regeneration and improvement,
• and encourage a circular economy that turns waste into ingredients that add value to Earth and our human society.

Imagine this guide is a step by step manual built collaboratively by researchers and urban changemakers from several cities from LatAm, and other world regions.

Take a moment the effect of having such knowledge source filled with videos, manuals, interfaces, and case studies. Imagine that your neighborhood has tapped into it and now is gathering in cyber-physical assemblies, transforming public spaces into regenerative appliances that engage participants in cultural practices of co-living wisely with nature and other humans.

Imagine a guide that will facilitate your neighborhood in adopting regen tech like biofilters to end water scarcity and reward the neighborhood with tokens from dePIN initiatives like WeatherXM, or with impact bounties from Atlantis.

🌱 Now, do not just imagine it, let's make it happen! through these three simple steps:

1. Please, consider donating 0.0016 ETH or more to our #GG20 campaign, however, whatever donation you can gift us that is above $1.15 USD is a blessing to us, because it will help us apply to the matching fund.
2. Share our campaign with other urban changemakers, protocols, dApps, and people that could mean new synergies.
3. Wish us good luck :) We still have several years to go and lots of challenges. All good vibes are greatly appreciated.