FreeganMap

FreeganMap is a karma points-based community that enables you to more easily discover, collect, and give away free stuff in your city, helping you easily reduce environmental waste and live more affordably, more often.

Right now, despite the existence of marketplace apps that facilitate the exchange of free goods, there are still too many perfectly good free items wounding up in landfills. Rising living costs and growing environmental instability show us that we need to make living more affordable for people while taking care of our one planet.

We think that free item exchange has not been a well thought of product, and that solving its user journey pain points requires a lot more than thinking about “free” as a marketplace product category.

Collectors of free things are the most notoriously unreliable to count on. They are flaky and often so uninvested in a freely offered item, that they don’t show up after contacting and coordinating with free item owners. This disincentivizes many free item owners from posting about their free items or wanting to interact with potential collectors. The result is that many free items are left unclaimed and unreported on the streets of our cities, every day, only to be picked up by the city to go straight into landfills.

Unlike most marketplace apps, FreeganMap features free reporting: anyone can report where free stuff is, not just item owners. Our active participants and staff members also actively digitize free assets around a city and post them on Freegan Map. And unlike any marketplace app, Freegan Map uniquely rewards participants for reporting and exchanging free items with "karma", based on our own very own $FGM "karma" coin (currently deployed on the Ethereum TestNet). Members can earn $FGM by reliably doing good karma on FreeganMap: report, successfully offer, and successfully collect free items while being reliable, responsive, and friendly during transactions. The more free items one reports, reliably gives aways, or reliably collects, the more one earns. Members can spend the $FGM they earn on things like earlier alerts and higher priority on the free items they want, bidding for items with their $FGM coins. And, members can lose their $FGM karma if they don’t show up for the items they said they would collect. With proper tokenomics, we can stimulate a flowing gifting economy, because the transactions of free items on Freegan Map will be more successfully filled by both parties, due to aligned incentives for everyone to earn more karma ($FGM).

One’s Karmic balance (the total $FGM earned and remaining in your custom Freegan Map wallet, received and automatically assigned to you on signup) represents both how active and how reliable you are in the community. Members with high karmic balances will match most often with other members of high karmic balances to facilitate smooth, easy transfers of free items with each other.

Members can use the points they earn to redeem rewards, in-app rewards for earlier alerts and priority on their highly desired items, and one day, monetary dividends for their karmic actions. Sponsored by community grants -- and a future DAO – stakeholders in a city can choose to support the efforts of FreeganMap participants by purchasing $FGM, raising the value of every karma point in members’ possessions. The members who have been most active reporting, collecting, and giving away free stuff can cash out their karma for funds, funded by community activists, environmental philanthropists, and other stakeholders.

By recognizing, rewarding, and quantifying the good will efforts of others to improve people's lives through gifting and environmental caretaking, we can create the proper rewards to enable a cleaner, more affordable, and environmentally caring world, one karma holder at a time.

Preview our live demo at https://freeganmap.com/#demo.

This project uses Web3Auth for user authentication, @filecoin for store post media via web3.storage including listing photos, and launched our $FGM coin on the Ethereum Rinkeby TestNet using @apeworx and @alchemy. We built our iOS based mobile app with React Native and Tailwind. Our backend is partially supported by both @filecoin and Python with Flask and Postgres deployed on Heroku. Our landing page is built with React and Tailwind deployed on Vercel.