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...

Ready to learn how Swae can help your organization?

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What does Future of Work even mean?

Like many phrases, the “future of work” has been a term thrown around for a long time in conferences and such and is a buzzword people use, but many don’t really understand what it means.

We found Deloitte has a pretty good (and simple) definition:

“We define the future of work as a result of many forces of change affecting three deeply connected dimensions of an organization: the work (the what), the workforce (the who), and the workplace (the where).”

Deloitte

When we dig into the technological, generational and social shifts taking place, we see very clearly that organizations today face extraordinary challenges. So, the “future of work” can be very elusive and difficult to map out when things change at speeds never seen before. From the likes of the global pandemic situation, to adapting to new technologies, competitors, customer needs, and social norms, it seems that every development is coming in at rates that we haven’t seen before.

What we see happening right now is that major companies are being disrupted daily, staff is feeling more and more disengaged, and customers are demanding new, innovative ways to connect.

Technology and the Future of Work

McKinsey & Company released a study in 2020 that explored How COVID-19 has pushed companies over the technology tipping point—and transformed business forever.

What they found surrounding COVID-19 in particular is that it pushed companies over the “technology tipping point” and transformed business forever. According to the Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, “We saw two years-worth of digital transformation take place in the first two months [of COVID-19]”.

In the eCommerce space, the changes were even more dramatic as the need to replace physical channels prevalent prior to COVID-19 became a life-or-death decision for many companies. Numerous reports and analysis confirm that COVID-19 forced more digital transformation to organizations in 3 months than over the past 10 years-worth of efforts by organizations and consulting firms combined. Every single industry has had to face new challenges that they need to learn how to overcome.

To help organizations adapt to these challenges, technology platforms have had to step up, with many reports showing how tech outperformed the broader market. Specifically, the entire sector was up about 40% in the calendar year of 2020 alone.

The study by McKinsey & Company also looked at how the workplace environment has shifted and digitization has accelerated supply-chain interactions and internal operations by three to four years! Even more shocking, was that the share of digital or digitally-enabled products in their portfolios accelerated by seven years!

The point? In order to stay competitive in this new business and economic environment it requires companies to think outside the box and come up with better ways to collaborate and to dramatically change their internal practices.

Senior Executives are taking note and recognize technology’s strategic importance as a critical component of the business, not just a source of cost efficiencies.

Chart source: McKinsey & Company Survey

In another study, G2’s 2022 Trends report on Software for the Hybrid Workplace showed that businesses in 2022 have begun to shift their focus from managing a hybrid office to achieving and maintaining efficient modes of communication in the post-pandemic work environment. 

The future of work around technology is that companies must find better solutions to remote working and remote collaboration. These two priorities sit at the top of the list that executives and organizations MUST look at and respond to immediately, or be left behind. 

The future of work around technological changes isn’t in the future anymore, it’s imperative to look at ways to enhance the hybrid work model, collaboration and employee engagement – and permutations of “work from home” – right now.

Generational and Social Shifts and the Future of Work

According to G2, companies will need to continue to offer a hybrid or fully remote option in order to retain top talent, especially after The Great Resignation of 2021 (the government’s jobs report released that over 20 million people quit their jobs in the second half of 2021. Some are calling it the “big quit,” others the “great resignation”).  

The desire for more freedom and flexibility has changed the employee experience forever and is now a huge social shift and generational priority. Therefore, communication and collaboration will be affected if teams are unable to adjust properly. Unfortunately, the standard video conferencing software will likely not be enough for teams in the long run. Part of adapting to this new environment will include a larger focus on tools that can enhance the virtual employee experience. 

High-quality communication and collaboration will become a priority for teams moving forward. Additionally, employers must consider individuals who may feel isolated if there is not enough team bonding time or face-to-face meetings. Finding ways to cultivate a healthy company culture and effective methods of communication in the current environment is vital.  

This is where Swae has been most helpful to organizations. We know that the world has changed irreversibly and new threats and opportunities arise daily for organizations. To source the best solutions to these challenges, the need for diverse options and competition for the best solutions has never been more important.  

A study by PwC Pulse Survey: Next in work states that we are at a pivotal moment for the future of work, and companies can help their businesses and employees thrive if employees remain the number one source of finding good solutions to internal and external challenges.

This is where Swae comes into the picture.

Swae solves this by helping organizations tap into the intelligence of their people with the ability to leverage the power of AI and a merit-based, bottom-up methodology. The outcome is the ability to develop smarter decisions without sacrificing speed.

For example, employees who feel comfortable speaking up at work about problems and their solutions to them are 92% more likely to want to stay with the company (even if offered a comparable position elsewhere) versus 60% for those who don’t feel comfortable or have the chance to speak up at all. 

Furthermore, 95% of those who do speak up expressed excitement to come to work to do their jobs and said they would recommend their company as a great place to work, compared with 61% among those who did not have the opportunity to speak up. 

Swae is on a mission to give everyone a voice and to help leaders uncover the possibilities from within their organization to drive significant improvements by unlocking hidden ideas from their people. Unlocking and cultivating the hidden innovations and opportunities have demonstrated time and time again that it can drive massive change and major improvements. The secret to doing this comes from what our inclusive platform activates to get there; trust, collaboration, engagement and an “idea meritocracy” where the best ideas rise to the top.

We want companies to WIN and we want leaders to understand the concept of what an “idea meritocracy” is. Therein lies the key to performance gains, and in the words of one of its most prolific enthusiasts, Ray Dalio, the Founder of Bridgewater Associates – the most successful hedgefund in history – and author of #1 New York Times bestseller Principles, said: 

In his book Principles, Mr. Dalio credits the system of idea meritocracy as the backbone of Bridgewater’s internal operating system and culture for unearthing trapped insights and turning unconventional ideas into organizational decisions. In an industry as reliant on high quality arguments, unbiased information, and sound decisions as the financial industry is – it’s no surprise how an idea meritocracy helped them build a repeatable and scalable system for helping the most appropriate internal and external decisions rise from the bottom to the top.  

Many believe this is Bridgewater’s secret weapon for outperforming all its competitors and every other hedge fund in the history of the industry. 

It’s becoming more widely accepted that an organization’s best ideas and solutions can come from anywhere regardless of the hierarchy, and Swae helps its users feel they have a real voice and platform that they can trust to share their ideas about problems and solutions at the workplace. These are ideas that would otherwise get lost or neglected in the complex and bureaucratic web of tools, workflows and processes that a large-scale modern company encompasses.

In a world where continuous innovation is increasingly critical and organizations must move at the pace of software companies, competitive success — perhaps even survival — requires moving beyond exclusive use of hierarchical decision-making, drawing on the power of crowdsourcing and markets wherever possible. Under today’s business environment and circumstances, creating a speak up culture and an idea meritocracy makes strong business sense. 

Study after study shows that increasing diversity in teams and companies is not an empty feel-good slogan – it actually leads to more frequent and better-quality innovation and improved financial performance, as experienced by firms like Bridgewater (e.g. BCG’s 2017 research findings).  

This is because diverse teams are shown to be smarter, identify and address cognitive biases more frequently in important decisions, and develop better innovations leading to improved financial performance against teams that are more homogenous. 

Experts believe this is the case because the greater the diversity of decision makers the more likely they can collect diverse inputs and options to select from, process information more carefully, and catch inherent biases more accurately, leading to more objective and informed choices to select from, and better end decisions. 

Companies that take these initiatives seriously and moves them forward as priorities perform better. Swae believes organizations CAN THRIVE when decisions are made more inclusively. The combination of creativity, innovative suggestions and quality of arguments presented through Swae can lead to more informed decisions, leading to better quality choices to select from that impact financial and organizational performance.

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…

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.

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