Swae, a Vancouver-based technology startup operating a bottom-up idea management and decision-making platform, has been chosen by SingularityNET’s executive team to support their Deep Funding grant allocation program, which offers their token holders from around the globe a chance to apply for up to $1M in grant funding for winning AI projects.

The Deep Funding program intends to distribute up to $1M USD equivalent value in AGIX tokens (valued at 0.11 USD per token) in the first funding round between March and May 2022. These rounds are expected to grow in size and scale after this initial implementation.

A budding partnership to power next generation DAO governance and their plans for progressive decentralization and community-driven decision-making

About SingularityNET’s DeepFunding.AI Grant Program

The Deep Funding program is an initiative from SingularityNET to seed the decentralized AI platform. In this program, they will offer a total of $1 Million in grants in round one. The project is searching for AI and app developers working on innovative AI products that will help grow the AI platform, to send in their proposal. The chosen project winners that will receive funding will keep ownership of their AI model, and be able to monetize their intellectual property and contribute to building a global ecosystem of decentralized AI (see DeepFunding.ai).

Hear about the Deep Funding Program directly from SNet’s Founder, Dr. Ben Goertzel

The Community’s Role in the Deep Funding Program

Deep Funding is intended to be a genuinely bottom-up and community-driven program where community involvement is essential for reviewing proposed grants and projects to ensure the best make it to the top.

Community members are invited to submit new grant proposals, read and review other proposals that come in, and help improve them through collaborative edits to help make the proposals cleaner and without errors. Collaboration will include the ability to point out strengths, risks, ask questions, as well as rate them against other idea proposals.

The collection of constructive and collaborative changes will signal to the wider community which proposals are gaining the most traction and are best positioned to be considered for an official vote and potential grant win.

Through the process of collective intelligence and constructive criticism from the community, the best proposals and projects will be prioritized and supported to implementation, and SingularityNET will begin practicing how best to implement community-driven governance for its DAO.

How Swae Powers the Deep Funding Program

Using Swae, Singularity NET will invite proposing teams and community members the following top goals: 

• The program will gather a constant supply of high quality AI project proposals that are a good fit for the Deep Funding Program
• Create continuous and constructive community involvement
• Prepare for scalability to support a longer term program potential

AI project teams from around the world will use Swae to introduce themselves and promote their project proposals into the greater community and receive valuable feedback.

The projects that are chosen as grant winners will receive funding through grants to develop their AI project using AGIX tokens from SingularityNET’s DAO platform called SingularityDAO.

Once the winning projects have been funded, the winning teams will launch their AI service on the decentralized AI-platform to start monetizing their service. There are two levels of grants that will be offered in round one:

1) $500.000 USD of AGIX will be distributed for smaller proposals with a maximum of 40.000 USD worth of AGIX per proposal

2) $500.000 USD In AGIX distributed to larger proposals with a maximum of 150.000 USD worth of AGIX per proposal.

See https://deepfunding.ai for more details. 

Why Swae was Chosen to Support the Deep Funding Program

Swae was chosen by the SingularityNET team as they found Swae to have all their desired features and function sets. They’re seeking to build a genuinely community-driven program, and Swae is much more than a crowdsourcing and voting platform, it’s a robust community-driven and consensus-building platform that enables decision-making that’s driven by collective intelligence. Swae was chosen for many reasons, including:

• Rich formatting options when creating proposals
• The affinity with AI-supported tooling such as the NLP writing tools they already have built-in
• The ability to contribute Proposals, Comments or Suggestions anonymously- allowing the difficult things to be said.
• The way that interactions are fully accountable and transparently tracked is a solid starting point for community-based interaction.
• The willingness of Swae’s team to collaborate in developing the platform gives the SingularityNET foundation and community an opportunity to enhance their roadmap, or even co-create with them, on the development of elaborate new features.

Pictured above shows Swae’s AI capabilities and reviewing process, whereby users benefit from various NLP AI algorithms to improve the quality of their initial proposal or idea. Some of Swae’s algorithms improve basic grammar, tone, sentiment and emotion, and more advanced algorithms under production will help detect bias in language and suggest evidence to further strengthen their ideas.

About SingularityNET

SingularityNET is one of the most ambitious web3, blockchain, and AI projects ever conceived in the world. 

The next cornerstone of the AI platform is ‘AI-DSL’, a protocol that allows individual AI services to dynamically find and communicate with each other, forming ad-hoc collaborations that are capable of much more complex tasks than any individual service would be.

This way, the project aims to remove one of the major limiting factors to AI growth today — the lack of interoperability — which severely restricts the ability to leverage the strengths and capabilities of individual AIs. The Sophia robot, the world’s most expressive robot, is one of our first use cases of this vision.

SingularityNET’s vision is to combine AI and blockchain to create a decentralized marketplace for different types of AI. This ecosystem is powered by the AGIX token that enables companies, organizations, and developers to buy and sell AI, but will also facilitate large numbers of autonomous transactions between all individual ai services. This capability will be further enhanced by HyperCycle, a novel Cardano Sidechain protocol, specialized in decentralized AI and capable of supporting the massive number of transactions needed for the future AI economy. SingularityNET’s “AI-as-a-service” aims to become the key open-source protocol for networking AI on the internet. A long term goal is to form a coordinated Artificial General Intelligence within the market network. It is an ambitious mission but the whole AI field is in its infancy (see SingularityNET.io).

In December 2017, @SingularityNET carried out an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) to raise funds for its ambitious vision and project. It is reported that their ICO was fully subscribed and raised $36 million USD in just 60 seconds! The Singularity team reported that the crowdfunding was capped after receiving $361 million in investor interest on its white list from more than 20,000 erstwhile investors.

For more info about SingularityNET, watch Dr. Ben Goertzel presenting SU Net at the World BlockChain Forum

About Swae

Swae is an idea management and decision-making platform that reveals solutions to problems directly from employees or stakeholder groups.

Founded in 2018, in Vancouver Canada, Swae’s platform disrupts the traditional hierarchy found within large organizations and provides a transparent and inclusive hub for ideation and collaboration. The combination of collective intelligence, AI and anonymity provide the foundation for users to provide critical feedback, improve ideas and vote on which ones move forward.

Organizations around the world use Swae to bring all voices to the table so they can uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within.

For more information, visit www.swae.io or contact Swae’s Media Relations Team here.

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?

More to explore…

This world-changing digital consultation gathered 523 proposals from over 1,750 thought-leaders from more than 140 countries, and the best solutions were presented to the UN General Assembly.

Background

In April 2021, we announced (see more here) a strategic partnership with the Brazil-based Igarapé Institute and the United Nations Secretary-General where Swae was deployed to canvass the voices of thought leaders in civil society, including leading private sector companies, philanthropic organizations, metropolitan authorities, parliamentarians, labor organizations, humanitarian and development agencies, and think tanks around the world, to source bold and actionable solutions to some of the world’s most monumental threats.

“The crisis of multilateralism arises because the global debate is decoupled with the real needs and immediate issues that affect We The Peoples”

Think tank, Argentina

A key priority of our partnership and the consultation exercise was to identify action-oriented recommendations to help the international community confront and adapt to new and emerging challenges, as well as bold actionable strategies to bolster the Sustainable Development Goals and Paris Climate Agreement.

Action

Between April and May 2021, the public consultation powered by Swae generated 523 proposals from 1,759 thought leaders from 147 countries.

Marking the United Nations 75th anniversary, the UN Member States called on the Secretary-General to organize a digital public consultation to collect ideas and recommendations from civil society to advance our common agenda. The UN Secretary-General used this process to gather actionable ideas across 12 areas crucial to protecting and enshrining humanity’s collective future.

The consultation process began with outreach to the global public and a wide range of influential stakeholders across different sectors to gather views on the world’s most pressing challenges and priorities for building a better future. These groups included companies, philanthropic groups, non-governmental organizations, universities, unions, minority, disability rights activists, and others.

The proposals received were potential solutions to some of world’s most monumental threats that range from deepening inequality, nuclear conflict, climate change, and more. Many touched on improving existing multilateral cooperation to build a safer, fairer and more sustainable world.

Results – What Swae Delivered

The We the Peoples consultation exceeded expectations in terms of the diversity of engagement and geographic reach of participants activating 30 civil society partners across the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia.

Input was received from leading NGOs, impact investors, philanthropists, parliamentarians, city leaders, academic institutions and under-represented groups such as minorities, migrants and conflict-affected communities, on solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the world and how we might adapt the UN and other multilateral organizations to problem-solve better.

The proposals collected helped elaborate new ways to rapidly accelerate delivery of the commitments made by governments in the UN75 Declaration adopted by the General Assembly in 2020. 

The digital consultation received a very strong and healthy gender parity and participation rates amongst users, recording a 48% Female vs 50% Male participation rate.  

The highest sub-group of under-represented minorities participating on the platform and consultation were “Women and Girls.” 

What participants and Swae users had to say about our platform…

Impact – What the Consultation Resulted in

The cumulative results from the digital consultation and other tracks of consultations were aggregated into a final report – Accelerating Inclusive Global Cooperation (Summary of the We The Peoples Digital Consultation) – which was released by the UN on September 10th, 2021.

The Igarapé Institute, in consultation with a group of experts, helped narrow down a subset of top proposals for deeper consideration by the UN Secretary-General and presentation to the UN General Assembly.

Factors such as the specificity, possible impact, actionability, innovation, and transformative potential, as well as the level of engagement elicited from other participants, were some of the criteria used to shortlist submissions for deeper diligence and consideration.

8/10   

said Swae made it easy for them to share their concerns as a global citizen into the future of global cooperation. 

…and increased their engagement, motivation and buy-in to the consultation process by sharing ideas through the platform.

See more stats in the full case study →

Top proposals by votes all seek to make the UN more inclusive, through: a world citizens’ initiative, UN parliamentary assembly and UN civil society champion.

If you want to get started with Swae, learn more here

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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 uninspiring, unethical, 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.

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 participatory, more 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.