Swae partners with Rutanio to support their process for broader distribution of RUTA tokens towards innovative entrepreneurial grant projects enabling community-based decision-making

The Vision: A Participatory and Knowledge-based Economy 

Medellín, Colombia, is in the process of engineering its reinvention. In less than three decades, it’s attempting to reposition itself from a hotbed for cartel violence and “the most dangerous city on earth” to the “Silicon Valley of South America.”

At the forefront of this transition is the Ruta N center, an innovation hub responsible for spearheading and coordinating the transition to a more prosperous and future-compatible economy. 

Ruta N’s job is to connect people, businesses, and companies to create new economic opportunities while supporting progressive and innovation-friendly public policy development to encourage digital acceleration and entrepreneurial growth. The organization cooperates with different international organizations to bring disruptive solutions to the city. They’ve created a hub, academy, and Distributed Innovation Platform to experiment with technologies and develop capacities to execute projects in a creative learning environment for innovative initiatives that will connect with global innovation and entrepreneurship communities.

Medellín, the city of eternal spring and the second-largest city in Colombia
(Credit: Rutanio)

As such, the Ruta N group is trying to shape a model where innovation is the primary driver of the economy and well-being of Medellín, with the mission to transform the city into a “knowledge economy” working closely with the government and other industry-leading stakeholders.

“What makes Ruta N unique is that this is an initiative backed up by public policies, and we are working on innovation and technology for almost 10 years because Medellin thinks that if we have a sustainable economy, this needs to be based on knowledge,” said Sin Kit, CTi solutions developer at Ruta N.

Elkin Echeverri Garcia, the former planning and foresight director at Ruta N, said that “The system we’re searching for isn’t to have more unicorns or to win the Nobel Prize…but to improve the standard of living.”

Rutanio and the RUTA Token: The MVPs of this Future Vision 

The Rutanio Project is an initiative catalyzed by Ruta N, supported by Medellín’s Mayor Federico Gutiérrez and local startup advisors, international Colombian business leaders, and diaspora community members.

The goal of the Rutanio project is to create a “Minimum Viable Economy” through the use and proliferation of an Innovation Token, the RUTA, which will facilitate the exchange of services, force digital adoption and digitization, eliminate high transaction costs, and generate value in the knowledge and innovation economy.

Rutanio intends to internationalize and accelerate the ecosystem of innovation, entrepreneurship, and creativity to provide the world with a simple, transparent and reliable way to access resources, capabilities, and talent.

Rutanio has developed the RUTA, a Complementary Digital Token and network that uses cryptographic techniques and provides top security to prevent counterfeit or duplication of token transactions. The purpose is to allow and facilitate, both in public and private sectors, the exchange of services, support of profit systems, elimination of friction in transactions, and generation of value in the knowledge and innovation economy.

Rutanio has also developed a blockchain ​​platform for the RUTA social token and an exchange market that desires to foster connections and support progressive entrepreneurial development. You can learn more about Rutanio and its mission by watching this video here.

Swae’s Role in Supporting a New Economic System Built on Collective Decision-Making

The Rutanio team initially approached Swae to request access to the platform to begin decentralizing decision-making and helping them include their community in important strategic decisions. Originally, they planned to invite their community members into a grant funding program to request RUTA tokens to build projects and initiatives that improve the value of the entire Rutanio ecosystem, and the usability of the RUTA token, for every member. 

Since Swae was built to provide everyone inside an organization an equal voice to raise solutions and shape decisions to create an inclusive decision-making environment, we chose to sponsor an annual license for Rutanio to help them realize their mission. 

Rutanio will utilize the Swae platform to help them: 

1. 1. Collect feedback from community members.
   2. Increase knowledge and adoption of blockchain technology in the city.
   3. Generate business opportunities.
   4. Accelerate the development of the technological capabilities of ecosystem members.
   5. Advance regulatory issues for distributed ledger technologies.
   6. Democratize and internationalize the Ecosystem of Innovation Articulated by Ruta N.

Swae’s collective intelligence, collaboration, and crowdsourcing features will allow members of the Rutanio community to create proposals anonymously with the support of AI that will improve the quality of those proposals and then open them up for the input of the larger community. The crowdsourcing feature will enable the proposals to be debated on their merits, edited with others’ perspectives, and voted on by all active members of the community. The proposals that receive the highest engagement (positive or negative) automatically percolate upwards to a decision by the Rutanio Community Council to fund the projects with RUTA tokens.

Using Swae, community members can apply for 3 streams of funding:

• Less than 250,000 RUTAs
• Between 250,000 – 750,000 RUTAs
• More than 750,000 RUTAs

The process set up by Swae helps Rutanio’s Community Council gather a greater level of truthful input, arguments, and data points to improve proposals to drive distribution and usability of Rutanio without creating a tremendous burden of added work for the members.

This new space facilitates community-driven decision-making, giving their community an intelligent decision-making platform combining anonymity, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence to help the organizations unleash the creativity of their members and make better quality decisions.

How Swae’s Technology Supports Tokenized Communities and Facilitates Bottom-Up Decision-Making

As more and more tokenized communities/Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) seek to build genuinely community-driven programs, Swae is poised to become the platform to support these efforts. The uniqueness that Swae brings is that it’s much more than a crowdsourcing and voting platform; it’s a robust, community-driven, and consensus-building platform that enables decision-making driven by collective intelligence. 

The world of Web3 and the explosive growth of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) will be a hotspot for experimentation around community governance. 

The features and functions that Swae offers that benefit tokenized communities includes, but are not limited to, the following: 

• Rich formatting options when creating proposals
• The affinity with AI-supported tooling, such as the NLP writing tools built-in
• The ability to contribute Proposals, Comments, and Suggestions anonymously, allowing the difficult things to be said openly and discussed 
• Interactions are fully accountable and transparently tracked to allow for open community-based interactions
• The team at Swae can collaborate for customized developments within the platform that can enhance roadmaps and allow for the co-creation of more elaborate new features as desired.

Today provides a unique opportunity for Swae to become the grant management and governance platform of choice that can support progressive DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) across the globe. 

The blockchain business models of DAOs are forging a promising new ecosystem for the exchange of services (internationally), entrepreneurial projects, and other digital startups. Swae strengthens a DAOs community by allowing more people to have a say in the decisions being made, providing an open and safe space where there’s accountability for the decisions and processes implemented, and a place to document outcomes creating an ongoing learning-based system of what works and what doesn’t. 

Swae sees the city of Medellín and Rutanio’s innovation and development center as progressive concepts. Many regional and local systems can mirror this approach to help solve real problems that provide a benefit to society and generate value through an open, collaborative and multidisciplinary approach. 

Swae is a powerful tool for bottom-up and community-led governance to structurally and culturally prepare governments and organizations for a management philosophy that is less hierarchical and where everyone can be included. 

At its fundamental essence, Swae provides organizations, government agencies, and DAOs an end-to-end proposal development and collective decision-making system, helping the collective users make sense of their members’ desired wants and needs, revealing hidden opportunities for consideration, and turning these into positive implementations.

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today's problems and generate tomorrow's strategy. Our clients are finding that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from the untapped potential within their workforce. We'd love the chance to show you how Swae can 'pay off' for you...

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