Dear CleanAppers, Over the past week, OUR petition gained more signatures & more support than in any other previous week. The momentum is building, and though the growth is slower than we wish, it is growth. And for that we are grateful, from the bottom of hearts to the tips of our litter-picking grabbers. OUR petition sits at a truly unique intersection between (1) advances in environmental science, (2) cutting edge technology, and (3) age-old social activism. Because there are so many different interests and actors in our field, change is very difficult. WE know that nothing worthwhile ever comes easily, and as we wrote in previous updates, we are here for the long-haul. One of the ways we are trying to speed up Google & BigTech's activation of trash/hazard reporting is explaining to this industry why it's in their bottom-line financial interests to take this practically no-cost step. Practically "no-cost" + big potential yields = a no-brainer. We are very confident in our ability to convince BigTech of the different value propositions here. But as we all know, WHEN we succeed and get tools like GoogleCleanApp and TwitterCleanApp, that will only be the start of the bigger campaign: convincing normal people all around the world that it's in THEIR interest to take a few seconds out of the day to report a some litter or a dumpsite they stumble upon, or to report a hazard that could get a child seriously hurt. We'd like to think that everyone is altruistic and will embrace this technology WHEN it becomes available. But we also have to be realistic and start developing extremely clear financial and other incentive structures for citizens to do this type of reporting. Fortunately, we are not alone in this fight. Over the past year, we have gotten to know several extremely driven teams who are focusing their efforts on developing rewards for people to report litter. Teams like OpenLitterMap.com & WasteSpace.io are litter-ally reinventing the field of economics, taking what's typically thought of as worthless trash and turning that very premise on its head. When you upload litter/dumpsite reports to OpenLitterMap.com, for instance, you get paid in a new cryptocurrency called Littercoin! And this is just the tip of the iceberg in this respect. CleanApp Foundation has been at the forefront of reward-based and incentivized trash/hazard reporting for the past five years. Our core patent outlined exactly the types of business models that are being implemented and refined now. We are very excited by this. We are doing everything possible to make sure that everyone learns about these extraordinary opportunities. As you've seen, we have many target audiences for our outreach, and this requires us to write in so many different jargons. We've tried to explain the purpose behind our petition to a global activist audience (change.org), to BigTech, to policymakers, to environmentalists, and most recently, even to children -- with our first children's story about CleanApp! Our current outreach project is to the so-called "Crypto" community (the folks who are out there "mining" Bitcoin and Ether that we hear about so often in the news). We are halfway through publishing a 5-part series on why projects like OpenLitterMap.com are the hidden keys that will unlock the full potential of Blockchain technology. The core point we're making there is simple: we don't know if these will be THE best solutions to our current trash problem, but these are solutions that we should be ACTIVELY supporting because they represent the type of new thinking that may allow us to finally turn the tide on pollution. We invite you to read this series and to share our work as broadly as possible. Although we have to use a lot of jargon to convey our core message to the "Crypto folks," you don't need a technical background or any previous exposure to Blockchain/Bitcoin/Ethereum to understand the huge opportunities that are lurking here. In fact, that is precisely why we think that "litter-mapping," "trash-tracking," "hazard-reporting" (or, to make it easy, just "CleanApping") is the application that the majority of the world will finally get to know and LOVE Blockchain technology through. It will already feel like a victory when we can easily generate CleanApp Reports about trash hazards, like that leaking hazardous pile in our petition photo (which is right on the shore of the Mississippi River, right in Downtown Memphis, by the way). But when technology allows us to link 3, then 15, then 197 of these CleanApp Reports together into a chain -- those 197 voices become much stronger together than even 197 CleanApp Reports submitted apart. E pluribus unum. What we just described is the core innovation and core genius behind Blockchain technology. And as you can see in the simple example above, civic-reporting is an ideal application of this technology, allowing us to open entirely new frontiers into what is possible. Here is the link to the 5-part series: https://medium.com/@cleanapp/cryptos-killer-app-is-litter-ally-under-our-feet-1-of-5-eb064a6ab215 Before we say good-bye, we wanted to ask you to please give us feedback on how we can improve our messaging to reach even more people. We are trying different formats, mediums, networks, and would love to hear from you regarding how we can broaden our reach. We are 3 signatures away from 200! Please think about your most environmentally-conscious friend or family member. Have you sent this link to them yet, and asked them what they think about our approach? Even if they think our petition is naive or utopian, we invite them to lend their support. We'll do our best to convince them that CleanApp isn't only doable; CleanApping is inevitable! Our job isn't to make the impossible possible. Our job is to accelerate adoption of a common sense solution to a really dangerous and really pesky problem. Thank you, truly, for believing in CleanApp! #CleanApp P.S. - The photo is by Uwe Hensel from our Medium "crypto" story, linked above. We use it here under a fair-use rationale, because this update links to that story. It's a beautiful shot. Definitely not what we think about as an environmentalist photo, but for a black & white image, it also captures so much ingenuity and creativity and vision and potential.