Hello, World!

Welcome to the first edition of the Geo Web Weekly Update! 

For those not familiar, the Geo Web is an open information network navigated & organized with geolocation. On the Geo Web, smart devices resolve geo-anchored digital content through lookups of an authoritative “digital land” registry in a general purpose browser. 

The Geo Web shares many of the same founding principles and familiar architectural components as the World Wide Web, but with a novel user experience and mechanism design. The Geo Web capitalizes on the mobile nature of today’s computing devices (and tomorrow’s augmented reality capabilities) to create shared digital experiences in the real world. The Geo Web’s mechanism design makes the network more distributed, egalitarian, and prosocial. Check out this short demo of Geo Web in action.

We started the project in earnest in July 2020 during HackFS and most recently were part of the APOLLO Fellowship Program. We’ve made strong progress with the efficiency and scalability of our Digital Land Registry & SALSA smart contracts over the last few months, so we’re rapidly approaching our beta launch of the network. 

Through launch and beyond, we’ll be back here every Tuesday documenting our journey to create the Geo Web. We’re excited to start sharing our progress publicly and hope that you’ll join the conversation!

Technical Updates

• We launched this website last week! Expect lots of updates to the site as we more fully lay out the vision for the Geo Web. 
• We finalized and started implementing the spec for representing land parcels on the Geo Web. Check out the spec in our Github as well as the beginning implementation of the smart contracts. Feel free to provide feedback and PRs. The Geo Web Project is entirely open source and all contributions are welcome.

Community Updates

• We wrapped up the 7-week APOLLO Fellowship on Wednesday 10/21 with Demo Day. It was a successful day showing off the Geo Web and checking out other awesome Web 3.0 projects (including several that we’ll hopefully work/integrate with). We highly recommend any aspiring Web 3.0 builders to check out the curriculum that Andy & the folks over at Gitcoin put together for the fellowship: inspiring, deep, and extremely helpful. Thanks to Protocol Labs for being a co-sponsor!
• Our Gitcoin grant is live! We’re participating in the Filecoin Liftoff/Apollo matching round (live now) and will hopefully build some momentum going into Grant Round #8 starting on December 2. If you’re not familiar with quadratic funding, check out the Gitcoin wiki or the epic Liberal Radicalism paper (Buterin, Hitzig, Weyl) for a deeper dive. It’s a truly powerful concept. Your small contribution can go a LONG way toward funding public goods like the Geo Web.
• A couple weeks back we had a great chat about Harberger Taxes with Jason Smythe of Wildcards.World and Avo Labs. Jason and his team are using Harberger Taxes (aka SALSA on the Geo Web, aka Always-for-Sale in his world… no one likes “taxes”) in a couple interesting and impactful ways. Check them out and snatch up a Wildcard! If you need any convincing that Jason and the Avo Labs team are doing truly important work, watch David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet on Netflix.
  

On Deck

• Research and implementation of Geo Web subgraphs on The Graph. The subgraph will initially be used to show which land parcels are available and unavailable on the upcoming Geo Web Cadastre.
• Beginning the redesign of our prototype Geo Web Cadastre for our beta launch. We’re mostly focused on integrating the new functionality and architecture of our smart contracts, but we’ll implement some styling updates and quality-of-life improvements as well.

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