Swae & MSF Canada Renew Partnership to Launch First Digital AGM

Swae & MSF Canada Renew Partnership to Launch First Digital AGM

Swae helps Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders Canada rapidly adapt to remote decision-making by digitizing their AGM during the Covid-19 Crisis

The COVID-19 Crisis is requiring companies and their leaders to rethink and prioritize their digital infrastructure and speed up plans for digitization. The need to empower internal and external stakeholder collaboration and communication in a virtual environment is likely here to stay. From team coordination, alignment, consensus building, strategic formation, governance and policy-making, our physical decision-making processes need to adapt to a world where much more must happen online.

To answer to evolving market demands, Swae has developed a suite of new products to serve the remote and digital-first reality. Swae’s new products build off the existing core technology platform to further enhance safe, secure, and easy-to-implement online-only methods of communicating and collaborating. These new products include Digital Policy Making, <, and Remote Team Decision-Making tools

While we have had many clients use Swae’s core platform so far, including Etihad Airways, The Ministry of Innovation and Labour at the City of Juarez, Mexico, and Bosch, the digital AGM version of Swae is a first use case for Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) who will utilize it to for their upcoming virtual Motions and Recommendations General Assembly in June 2020.

In 2019, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders initially partnered with Swae to hold a more digitally friendly, inclusive, and efficient motions and recommendations review process using the first version of Swae’s platform. In light of the Covid-19 crisis and building off of last year’s positive experience, earlier this year the Canadian section of MSF renewed the partnership and contract with Swae to create MSF’s first virtual Motions and Recommendations General Assembly in 2020 using Swae’s new Digital AGM product (in combination with other governance tools at their disposal such as videoconferencing, website, etc.).

Swae’s Digital Annual General Meetings (AGMs) product creates a more safe, secure, accurate, and transparent environment allowing every shareholder to attend.

“Given the implications of the COVID-19 global crisis, now, more than ever, people need the right tools, platforms, and safe environments to make high-quality collective decisions about a lot of things that remain uncertain. We’re proud to renew our relationship with MSF to pilot our latest product — Swae for AGMs. This product helps organizations create a more inclusive decision-making process, create more transparency, and develop healthy competition for the best solutions. Never has it been more important to ease the tensions and make decisions with utmost buy-in,” said Soushiant Zanganehpour, CEO, Swae

“We’re very excited to be working with Swae again. This year our AGA will be hosted online and Swae’s platform will ensure that despite the challenges of COVID19, our motions process can go forward smoothly and the voices of our members will continue to be heard,”

Anne Connelly, Board Member
Motions and Recommendations Committee, MSF Canada.

Swae-MSF

How Swae can help your organization make the switch?

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. Take a look through our latest resources to help you make a decision:

Digital AGM Overview Deck: https://docsend.com/view/yrpr5fvxs5uc6v4c
Public Launch Date: May 15, 2020
For more information regarding Swae and the Digital AGM use cases, please contact a Swae specialist here

Adapt Chile announces Swae partnership to transform Chilean Climate Change Law

Adapt Chile announces Swae partnership to transform Chilean Climate Change Law

Announcement

We are proud to announce that from June 2019 through August 2019, Swae’s platform will be leveraged for an important Digital Consultation process engaging the Chilean Network of Municipalities (ChNM) on 6 new pillars of Chilean Climate Change Law. Through a first-of-its-kind initiative, mayors from more than 50 different municipalities across Chile will have the opportunity to provide feedback and further develop Chilean Climate Change Law and engage local civic leaders in policy creation.

This is a collaborative initiative between SwaeAdapt-Chile, a leading national and international NGO promoting comprehensive actions to encourage climate adaptation policies and strengthening local responses to climate change, and COCOA (‘Crowd Collaboration for Climate Adaptation’), an innovation-driven organization advocating on the use of digital technology to encourage climate action and collaboration towards the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Deployment and Potential Impact

The initiative is aimed to improve the governance of subnational governments grouped in the municipality RedMuniCC (Red Chilena de Municipios ante el Cambio Climático) and support the RedMuniCC to collectively create shared positioning about the forthcoming Climate Change Law (CCL). This shared positioning will create an important precedent on how representatives at different levels of the government can contribute to collectively generate inclusive laws in a bottom-up manner. Allowing for open feedback and commenting, as well as fostering debate on the merits of each pillar, the initiative has been designed and set up to enable voices that would not always be heard and channel that feedback safely into more inclusive policy.

“Swae offers the possibility of bringing together representatives at different geographic locations. Moreover, Swae helps by supporting the collective, transparent, and anonymous discussion of CCL-related ideas among all representatives.”

– Dr. Iván S. Razo-Zapata, COCOA Collaborative Innovation BV

A driving purpose of this experiment is to generate an official positioning for the Chilean Climate Change Law. It also helps promote collective contributions to climate-related regulations in a bottom-up manner. Finally, this initiative can improve collective decision-making processes within RedMuniCC.

Looking Forward

In order for the consultation to be officially integrated as evidence into the Climate Change Law policy creation process, more than 50% of the members of the municipality must participate. As of early August, we are a few municipalities shy of achieving this important milestone and are optimistic we will surpass the required threshold.

By leveraging Swae, those participating in the pilot aim to hone and adapt Chilean Climate Change Law, enabling the conditions for more holistic bottom-up policy creation and development. We believe these sorts of innovative approaches are paramount to the government’s ability to design a policy that works for all stakeholders across marginalized and far-reaching geographic regions.

Swae, The Future of Organizations, Decision-Making, and Governance

Swae, The Future of Organizations, Decision-Making, and Governance

The Problem

For the past ~3 years, I’ve grown evermore frustrated by the lack of voice or meaningful influence normal people seem to have in the big decisions institutions and organizations make that significantly impact our lives. Simply voting for candidates or filling out engagement surveys at work feels inconsequential, futile, and, well, insulting. These ‘participation’ options don’t seem to influence the dull, unoriginal, and incomplete solutions most leaders tend to develop in response to the uniquely complex business and social challenges of today’s world. They don’t help prevent abuse of power or keep leaders accountable to their promises. Instead, they provide us a false sense of agency. As consumers, we have so much influence over our life choices, but as employees or citizens, we have so little say in much more important decisions. So, why are these our only participation options?

Our modern day decision-making model is broken.

The root of this problem boils down to our organizational paradigm — how we make decisions and organize ourselves in society. Our modern day decision-making model is broken. It’s outdated, too centralized, too efficiency-obsessed (think factories and conveyor belts of the 19th century industrial era, when this decision-making model reigned supreme), too exclusionary; over-relying on hierarchies, representation, and delegated authority, andconfining stakeholders to strict parameters for participation based on status or function, when we live in a world where ideas, expertise, and genius are distributed and directly accessible through technologies and protocols.

As we move from crisis-to-crisis in our political systems — see first-hand the limitations of many democratic institutions to govern effectively and anticipate challenges — or witness the uninspiringunethical, and poor decisions made by leaders in large incumbent companies about how best to navigate complexity, we see how unfit our decision-making model is in today’s world.

 

What We Believe

About 2 years ago, I began exploring alternative decision-making models from today’s status-quo, to see how we can “upgrade” decision-making in organizations (both companies and democratic institutions)— consequently upgrading governance. I attended Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program to learn more about the problem and build a solution.

During my research, first-hand customer discovery and experience at SU, I became convinced that we’re in the middle of an irreversible social and cultural transformation, accelerated by new technologies and unreasonable entrepreneurs. We are transitioning from one strong set of operating assumptions about how to manage society, to a new, upgraded set. The transition we are undergoing will redefine how we organize institutions, how we create new companies, who has a voice, what’s an acceptable social-contract. But the path is murky.

Source: Frank Diana, Tata Consultancy Services

The combination of increased computing power, the rise of blockchain technology, demographic and cultural changes has made the idea of designing alternative organizational decision-making structures and governance models that are different from today’s status quo — models that are more participatorymore intelligent, less corruptible, less costly — a real possibility.

These are still the early days but the trajectory is clear.

What We’re Building

Inspired by the pace of change, last year, I started a company to re-image organizational decision-making and build the operating system for future organizations. Our first product is Swae, an intelligent decision-making platform combining anonymity, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence, to help organizations unleash the creativity of their stakeholders and make better quality decisions. Using Swae, individuals within organizations create great proposals anonymously with support of AI, then improve the quality of those proposals with crowd input. Proposals are debated on their merits, collectively evolved, and voted on. The proposals that receive the highest engagement (positive or negative) automatically percolate upwards to a decision (by management or the collective).

By providing the right mix of technology and process, Swae helps organizations efficiently tap into the wisdom of their stakeholders without reinventing the entire organizational structure. Swae’s process circumvents the blockages associated with traditional hierarchical organizational structures (cognitive bias, disengagement, fear of lost status and internal politics suffocating the expression of new ideas, etc.), to provide a more direct, transparent, and efficient pathway for ideas to go from the bottom to access management support. This helps decision-makers gather a greater level of truthful input, arguments, and data points to improve products, services, strategy and business models, without creating a tremendous burden of added work for management.

Swae intends to upgrade decision-making first in companies, then communities, then cities.

Etihad Airways Partners with Swae for Innovation

Etihad Airways Partners with Swae for Innovation

Announcement

We’re excited to announce our first flagship partnership and upcoming proof-of-concept with Etihad Aviation Group. Together, we plan to deploy Swae’s platform company-wide to help improve the inclusivity and quality of bottom-up ideas generated and the employee-led innovation process. Through the proof of concept, Etihad aims to leverage Swae’s platform, our methodology, and AI tools to help take employee ideas to the next level, to influence the broader strategic direction of the organization.

Backstory

This partnership has been a work-in-progress for several months now. Our teams first met while participating in NYU Abu Dhabi’s StartAD Venture Launchpad program in April 2018. Thanks to NYUAD’s stewardship, they brokered a handful of such opportunities to allow start-ups like us to explore different applications of our platform within operations of established companies.

Deployment and Potential Impact

Etihad Airways is undergoing a subtle, yet very exciting transformation. Having welcomed a new CEO, they are preparing to become more organizationally nimble, adept, customer-centric, and more technologically driven in order to insulate against the general challenging trends facing the global airline industry. Moments like this offer unique opportunities to introduce new ideas, processes, policies and infrastructure to help sustain a shift in the orientation and trajectory of the organization for long-term competitiveness, prosperity and future-compatibility. Our partnership comes at a pivotal time, one in which we’re excited to explore the different ways in which Swae can support Etihad Aviation Group’s growth and adaptation.

Though specific details about the proof of concept are still being finalised (and cannot yet disclosed), kick off is expected in early 2019. We wanted to share this news with our community and supporters, as you watch us grow and test Swae’s platform, technology and operational capabilities while deploying in an organization of 15,000+ people. For us, the volume and diversity of ideas and decisions generated by the pilot will help us improve our systems and processes, calibrate our tools, and have real world learning to apply to more public facing experiments and applications.

Next Steps

2019 is already shaping up to be a great year, with a few other pilots expected to deploy early in the year. One we are in discussions with is a Smart City looking to deploy Swae’s platform for a large participatory budgeting / citizen policy creation experiment. Watch this space as we share more news about this pilot and the other experiments in our pipeline soon.

Swae & The Future Society on the Governance of AI

Swae & The Future Society on the Governance of AI

We’re very excited to announce our first pilot with the AI Initiative, an initiative of The Future Society, in which Swae will conduct Sentiment Analysis on the content of the AI-Initiative’s crowdsourced global civic debate on the rise and governance of Artificial Intelligence.

Background on the Global Debate on AI Regulation

In September 2017, the Future Society and the AI-initiative, in partnership with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence, launched a global civic debate that invited members of the public to crowdsource thoughts and opinions about how artificial intelligence technologies across business, government, society should be governed to achieve a beneficial future for all. Led over a seven-month period, The Future Society’s collective intelligence effort assembled over 2000 diverse and multi-lingual participants (citizens, practitioners, experts, and researchers working on AI, robotics, cyber, public policy, international relations and economics) through offline and online event held globally, who collectively shared over 3,300 contributions in five languages. The collection of opinions provides novel perspectives on the governance of AI and insights on how the AI revolution is playing out in different geographies, its consequences and how they need to be governed to capture the upsides, minimize the downsides and ensure that its benefits reach everyone. The availability of the platform in different languages was a conscious effort by The Future Society to design a truly inclusive conversation, attract the largest number of global voices, and shape a *global policy framework that aligned to our local cultural values.

The Debate’s Relevance to Swae

Although Swae’s primary platform is a distributed decision-making tool supported by AI, we are offering important sentiment analysis capabilities for administrators inside organizations and cities. We’re therefore leveraging this pilot opportunity to help build out our capabilities to improve our general offering and support our mission of making collective decision making an intelligent and efficient alternative to the status quo. In this pilot, we will conduct data analysis and experiment with data science techniques and existing NLP/NLG APIs to see what kinds of insights we can derive from the collection of rich opinions and discussion threads. We hope the insights we can reveal help us visualize the commonalities in perspective from geographically dispersed regions, highlight unique differences and previously unrevealed solutions or suggestions on how to govern the exponential growth of AI to ensure it’s a net positive and prosperity-enabling force for all humanity. In a later post, we will share some high level findings about the global sentiment expressed about the future growth and regulation of AI in our analysis.

Presentation of Findings at the European Parliament

The results of the debate, along with any meaningful insights we may uncover from our analysis during the pilot, will all be shared at the official launch of a report at the European Parliament in Brussels, Belgium on September 26th. For those interested in attending, the event offers some interesting interactive workshops with leaders in the Machine Learning field, immersive experiences with an artistic design installation, and the opportunity to take a “seat at the table” to shape global AI policy.

About Swae

Swae is an AI-driven decision-making and governance platform that helps raise the quality and inclusivity of decisions within organizations, allowing people to participate directly in key strategy, budget, operational decisions and create solutions from the bottom up that can be institutionalized. By combining anonymity, artificial, and collective intelligence Swae helps organizations unleash the creativity of their stakeholders, discover new unrevealed ideas, and collectively build bottom-up solutions to strategy and resource allocation decisions, and improving overall decision quality without significant work for management.

About the The Future Society & AI-Initiative

The AI Initiative is an initiative of Harvard University’s The Future Society, a global non-profit think-and-do-tank dedicated to better understanding questions of impact and governance of emerging technologies. Created in 2015, The Future Society gathers students, researchers, alumni, faculty, business leaders, policy makers and experts from around the world ,through it’s expertise in Research, Convenings and Executive Education, to help shape the global policy framework for emerging technologies, including Artificial Intelligence.
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