Swae sponsors innovative Blockchain community Rutanio – enabling a commercial Columbian ecosystem that fosters Entrepreneurship & Creativity

Swae sponsors innovative Blockchain community Rutanio – enabling a commercial Columbian ecosystem that fosters Entrepreneurship & Creativity

Swae sponsors innovative Blockchain community Rutanio – enabling a commercial Columbian ecosystem that fosters Entrepreneurship & Creativity

4 min read, 11 April 2022

FOFO business leaders not listening

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.

Entrepreneurship and innovation have grown to become essential pillars for future growth in the city’s region of Antioquia and nationally in Colombia.

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. 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.

As more and more tokenized communities & DAOs seek to build genuinely community-driven programs they need more sophisticated and transparent systems to help build trust and progression. 

Swae is 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.


Soushiant Zanganehpour Swae Founder and CEO

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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...

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

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Swae Partners with the Igarapé Institute and the United Nations launching a global digital consultation to strengthen international cooperation

Swae Partners with the Igarapé Institute and the United Nations launching a global digital consultation to strengthen international cooperation

The Igarapé Institute and United Nations Taps Into Our Collective Intelligence Platform to Crowdsource the Best Proposals to Adapt Multilateral Institutions and Global Problem Solving to Meet Tomorrow’s World

VANCOUVER and RIO DE JANEIRO

The world is facing monumental threats ranging from disease outbreaks and climate change to nuclear conflict and deepening inequality. In order to strengthen global cooperation, the United Nations is seeking input from stakeholders across different sectors of society to improve international cooperation. Swae is helping accelerate an innovative digital consultation to enhance and strengthen international cooperation, and reveal creative solutions to tackle the biggest challenges facing the world.

Working in partnership with the Brazil-based Igarape Institute and to support the United Nations Secretary General, Swae is being deployed to canvass the voices of civil society, including leading private sector groups, philanthropic organizations, metropolitan authorities, parliamentarians, labor organizations, humanitarian and development agencies, think tanks and civil society groups around the world. The platform is being used to generate bold and actionable proposals to bolster multilateral action and build a safer, fairer and more sustainable world in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The digital consultation will use Swae to crowdsource creative proposals for ways to rapidly accelerate delivery of the commitments made by governments in the UN75 Declaration adopted by the General Assembly in 2020. A key priority is identifying bold actionable strategies to bolster the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Agreement. With the help of Swae, the consultation will generate action-oriented recommendations to help the international community confront and adapt to new and emerging challenges.

The digital consultations are taking place between April and May 2021 and reaching all corners of the world. “This is an unprecedented opportunity to shape a new narrative for multilateral action”, according to Robert Muggah, the founder of Igarape Institute and SecDev Group. “Swae is a critical platform to take these kinds of debates to the next level”, he added. Swae will not just help develop new ideas, it will also ensure a high degree of diversity and inclusion in the consultation itself.

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“This project is an exciting step in improving the speed, diversity and user experience of consultation processes for critical institutions such as the United Nations. We urgently need to improve the quality of exchange between the general public and decision-makers. This is what Swae is designed to do. We’ve rapidly customized the platform to ensure that the voices of people too often excluded from these kinds of global conversations are front and center.” – Soushiant Zanganehpour, CEO of Swae

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Thanks to Swae, invited participants can access and input to the digital consultation and benefit from the company’s Natural Language Processing and Writing Improvement AI features in all six official UN languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

Video and Visual Preview of the New Swae Platform

Below are screenshots of the all-new platform, redesigned for this consultation.

Screenshots of the New Swae Platform

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About Swae

Swae is an AI-powered platform for turning feedback into smart, inclusive decisions for organizational improvement. With over 25,000 users, Swae’s platform creates a safe, inclusive, and anonymous space for problem and solution generation inside any organization, allowing leaders to source investable solutions, hear the truth, boost engagement, and reduce bias in important strategic decisions to improve overall performance.

Since launching in 2019, Swae has been implemented for clients such as Etihad Airways, Bosch, Doctors without Borders, Lifelabs, EMC Insurance, and the governments of Mexico and Chile, amongst others. We’ve won many prestigious awards recognizing our innovative approach to hacking through hierarchies and making inclusion useful to decision making.

More Info

FOR INFORMATION ABOUT SWAE, CONTACT: info@swae.io

FOR INFORMATION ABOUT THE DIGITAL CONSULTATION, CONTACT wethepeoples@igarape.org.br

ACTION BY THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

To mark UN75, the UN’s 193 Member States adopted a Declaration setting out a vision for achieving the future we want and the UN we need. In it, they note they have listened to the concerns and aspirations of the people, through the UN75 global conversation, and pledge: “We are here to respond.”

They also tasked the UN Secretary-General to report back by September 2021 with recommendations “to advance our common agenda and to respond to current and future challenges”. 

‘WE THE PEOPLES’ DIGITAL CONSULTATION

The Secretary-General launched Our Common Agenda, a process of consultation and reflection to generate ideas to inform his September 2021 report. This process is being led by the Secretary-General’s office with support from a network of global partners, including the United Nations Foundation, Igarapé Institute, Accord, Southern Voice, and the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy of the National University of Singapore.

The “We the Peoples” digital consultation is one part of this effort. Building on the UN75 global conversation, the consultation invites stakeholders from different sectors to develop practical recommendations to: accelerate delivery of the commitments made in the UN75 Declaration, together with the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Agreement; and to respond to new and emerging challenges.

Source: https://un75.online/take-action/

Using Augmented Intelligence to Address COVID-19

Using Augmented Intelligence to Address COVID-19

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How can AI help us gain new perspectives on the roadblocks of COVID-19? 

Can AI provide us with the ability to see more opportunities in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic? 

These questions, and more, are covered in this virtual event hosted by Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and the AI Initiative at The Future Society to officially announce a global alliance on the COVID-19 pandemic response. The alliance will provide an information service not yet available that is vitally important to facing and mitigating the crisis.

CAIAC is the new alliance that stands for Collective & Augmented Intelligence Against COVID-19.

One of our Board Members, Cyrus Hodes, is the Chair of the AI Initiative with The Future Society, an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit think-and-do tank. He has a full segment showing you the CAIAC platform in detail and how this alliance will be collaborating about this pandemic. 

What is augmented intelligence?

Augmented intelligence is a design pattern for a human-centered partnership model of people and artificial intelligence (AI) working together to enhance cognitive performance, including learning, decision making and new experiences. [Source: Gartner.com]

Which is different than artificial intelligence:

On the other hand, the term “artificial intelligence” is often used to describe machines (or computers) that mimic “cognitive” functions that humans associate with the human mind, such as “learning” and “problem solving”. [Source: Wikipedia]

To watch Cyrus’ talk and demonstration of the CAIAC platform, please watch here: 

To watch the full Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) and the AI Initiative at The Future Society’s virtual event, please click here.

Swae Celebrates the 2-Year Anniversary of Winning the Global Challenges Foundation’s New Shape Prize

Swae Celebrates the 2-Year Anniversary of Winning the Global Challenges Foundation’s New Shape Prize

Part 1 of 2: Quick Recap on the purpose of the Prize, How We Won, and What We’ve Done Since

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Two years ago almost to this day, The Global Challenges Foundation in Sweden generously awarded Swae as one of three winners of the New Shape Prize (a $600K USD grant amongst 14,000 global applicants) for having a unique and innovative solution to fundamentally improve global governance, decision-making, and our democratic institutions to be more compatible with 21st-century technology, culture and socio-political developments. Our team was incredibly honored and grateful to be given this recognition and it served as an important developmental milestone for us.

Below we share details about the award, our winning pitch, and a summary of how we leveraged the resources to build a working prototype and begin piloting it in real organizational and political environments.

Goals of the New Shape Prize

The New Shape Prize (originally a $5M grant) was generously financed by the Foundation’s benefactor, Mr. Laszlo Szombatfalvy, and designed to inspire ideas and stimulate debate around new, more effective forms of global cooperation at the highest levels about how the world community manages global catastrophic risks, ranging from climate change effects to weapons of mass destruction.

The short 1min explainer video below better describes the New Shape Prize (for those that are unfamiliar with it):

 

The Problem Swae Identified

Today’s international institutions are poorly suited to building experimental or creative win-win solutions to the problems we face as a globe or a collective species. Consequently, there are dangerous emerging under-managed macro risks stemming from the limitations of our governance structures. Our system is no longer fit for our new age and we need new actors, new operating assumptions, and new norms to help reframe our priorities and uphold humanity-first, and nations second. We need new processes and improved participation methods in order to create new solutions that prioritize and give political weight to ideas that advance humanity, preserve and benefiting all in our species, above a narrow set of national self-interests.

Swae’s Winning Submission

The submission on behalf of Swae proposed the introduction of a technology platform to decentralize global governance to participatory and deliberative models. Using an AI-based collaboration platform (which we were in the early stages of prototyping), we intended to fuel much greater citizen collaboration and ideation around policies and budget suggestions, as the entry point for decentralized and meaningful citizen participation in governance. By using technology and AI for the good, Swae intended to create alternative forms of sovereignty, across the local, national and international spheres, to challenge or complement the authority and sovereignty of nation-states to make decisions about our collective well-being.

Here’s our in-depth proposal “Reinventing Global Governance and Democracy through AI-supported Bottom-up Deliberation”: Download the PDF or View Online.

How we used the award?

Two years really seems to fly by when you’re building a company and trying to democratize democracy! The win was an incredibly important milestone in our journey so far and helped really kick off the growth of Swae through the financial and reputational outcomes of this award.

Immediately upon the win, our startups financial pressures were (temporarily) alleviated, and the news of the award provided validation of and interest in our concept. Because of this, it attracted new interest from angel investors, new potential clients, and a host of enthusiasts (researchers, philosophy and political theorists, documentary film makers, activists, other technology providers, etc.) who had worked on similar ideas or were absolutely thrilled to see a group recommending a non-incremental change to our democratic processes and the management of global affairs. The award, and this relative validation, created pilot opportunities for us to scope out. We were able to grow our user base and much, much more (see more below).

Here’s a shortlist of some of the things that we were able to achieve with this award.

  • We got the financial runway to build a MVP of our platform and really move forward in a more progressive manner
  • We were able to recruit important members of our core team (CTO and Co-Founder, strong advisors, Marketing Lead, etc.)
  • We launched 5 pilot programs and signed our first commercial annual contract
  • We were able to grow our user base from 0 to over 15,000+
  • Since being able to initially grow the team, we retracted twice given market uncertainties and now we face the latest issues caused by the COVID-19 crisis

Below is our winning pitch and below that we the slide deck that won us the prize.

Click here to see our presentation deck

In part two of this series, we’ll provide a more in-depth look at what we’ve accomplished, learned and struggled with since the win — stay tuned!

And, once again, our sincere thank you goes out to the Global Challenges Foundation for this award!

A Digital-First Mindset is Now Required

A Digital-First Mindset is Now Required

Organizations Must Adapt to the Need for Remote Decision-Making and Holding Annual General Meetings During and After the COVID-19 Crisis
The Annual General Meeting (AGM) season is fast-approaching and with the outbreak of the Coronavirus (COVID-19), it has left many companies wondering how to approach their upcoming AGMs and asking questions like:
How do we make this 100% virtual and safe for our shareholders?
How do we meet our legal obligation to ensure we’re compliant of bylaws?
How can we make this digital transition as painless as possible and ensure we can trust the platform that we choose?
How do we make this 100% inclusive and accessible if it’s online?
How do we do this quickly and without a large investment?

Leadership is now required to change their approach to the digital frontier, and now more than ever people need the right tools, platforms, and safe environments to make high-quality collective decisions about many things that remain uncertain.

Due to the growing travel concerns and social distancing requirements in place for most of the globe, physical in-person meetings for AGMs cannot happen. Regulating authorities have issued guidelines and measures to deal with the COVID-19 crisis and now companies must seek the right technologies to address these concerns.

THE ANSWER:  DIGITAL ANNUAL GENERAL MEETINGS (AGMs)

Swae’s team has responded quickly to this need by creating a Digital Annual General Meetings (AGMs) product that provides a safe, secure, accurate, and transparent environment allowing every critical shareholder to attend.

The major advantages of holding a virtual AGM:

  1. Every shareholder gets a voice in a safe and secure environment
  2. Companies can say goodbye to paper
  3. The transparent nature of the digital AGM allows for a more inclusive meeting and more stakeholders to have a voice
  4. Allows for an online voting system with data received in real-time
  5. During a time of any crisis, all persons involved can participate from the safety of their own homes
COMING YOUR WAY MAY 2020

Launching Swae for Digital Annual General Meetings

Thankfully, virtual meetings have been increasing in popularity and growing numbers of companies and organizations have adopted this online-only or online-hybrid method of communicating with their stakeholders or shareholders.

In recent years, high-profile companies such as Comcast, Intel, Starbucks, Paypal, and Hewlett Packard having held virtual-only AGMs. Even Lululemon (NASDAQ: LULU), a Delaware company based in Vancouver, conducted its AGM completely virtually, leading to local media coverage and a debate over the use of virtual AGMs.

Given the time we live in, we expect to see similar acceptance of the online forum among most Canadian companies and organizations.

Making the switch after years of traditional annual meetings doesn’t need to be stress-inducing, but involves a change of mindset, adoption of new technologies and processes.

Making the switch with Swae’s new digital AGM product can make it easier than one would imagine.

BE THE FIRST TO BE NOTIFIED WHEN SWAE’S DIGITAL AGM PRODUCT IS AVAILABLE! 
(AVAILABLE MAY 2020)

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