UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) announced earlier this week the winners of the inaugural year of Climate Call, an AI-enabled platform (powered by Swae) dedicated to empowering young voices in climate action, especially those from marginalised communities.

At the Grand Finale attended by UICCA’s President and CEO, Her Highness Sheikha Shamma bint Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, three winners were awarded for their category-leading ideas:

Her Highness Sheikha Shamma bint Sultan bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, President and CEO of UICCA, said, “Climate Call began as a simple question: how can we use AI to make climate conversations more accessible and inclusive. Fast forward to today and we have three stand-out concepts developed by talented young people, each with great potential for tangible positive impact on our world. The quality of practical, grassroots solutions that this initiative has brought to light demonstrates the importance of giving a voice to youth in the climate debate. Together, we must find more ways of enabling communities from all backgrounds and ages to develop their own ideas to tackle the climate crisis.”

The grand finale featured presentations from the finalists, with a panel of distinguished judges selecting one winner per challenge category. The expert panel included Dr. Afkar Hilles, Food Security Expert from the Abu Dhabi Agriculture and Food Safety Authority (ADAFSA); Eng. Athbeh Hamdan AlShehhi, Senior Engineer of Climate Change and Sustainability at Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA); and Angela Homsi, Founder and President of Ignite Power.

In her remarks, as an expert judge for the Food Security challenge, Dr. Afkar Hilles stated, “Our global food system lies at the heart of the climate crisis. From agricultural practices to food waste, the industry has a substantial impact on the planet’s ecosystems, and the solutions presented here highlight the urgency of change. What we need now are bold, scalable innovations to transform how we grow, process, and distribute food. Each finalist has brought forward solutions that not only reduce environmental impact but also enhance food security, strengthen communities, and foster resilience in the face of climate adversity.”  

Climate Call offered young participants a collaborative space to propose, evaluate, and develop their ideas. In line with UICCA’s commitment, the winners have each received an award of AED 25,000 per winner project in each challenge category, and their stories featured on The Climate Tribe storytelling platform.

Climate Call is UICCA’s grassroots legacy project from COP28, aligned with the UAE’s commitment to host the most inclusive COP ever held to place both people and planet at the heart of the climate process. Climate Call generated hundreds of innovative ideas from across the globe.

The UICCA

The UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) is a non-partisan, climate action entity that has a mandate to bring together members of the public and private sector, including academic institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to drive the UAE’s commitment towards net zero by 2050. In the lead-up to the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28 UAE), the UICCA was mandated with establishing an independent body to advise COP on collaboration, cooperation and innovation. Climatecall.com is one example of direct innovation towards useful solutions and recommendations to decision-makers. Outside of this example, the UICCA operates as a think tank, and advisory resource, providing advice and recommendations to a range of stakeholders on positive climate action that facilitates the transition to a green economy. Included in its mandate, the UICCA facilitates international business, innovation and technology partnerships that work towards the common goal of tackling climate change.

Swae

Swae is a platform for organization-wide ideation, crowdsourcing, and decision-making.  Swae’s AI and bottom-up collaborative features encourage users to contribute ideas to improve any organization or suggest solutions to emerging and topical challenges. The best and most debated ideas bubble up to a review by management automatically. Decisions are made on the platform ensuring a strong feedback loop, reinforcing trust, transparency, and engagement. 

With over 50,000 users, Swae creates a secure, inclusive, and anonymous space for problem-solving within organizations, enabling leaders to tap into their workforce’s creativity to address pressing challenges and improve overall performance.

Since launching in 2019, Swae has been implemented for clients like the United Nations, Etihad Airways, Bosch, Doctors without Borders, Lifelabs, EMC Insurance, and the governments of Mexico and Chile, amongst others.

More to explore…

The world today is facing three planetary crises: climate change, biodiversity loss and unmanageable amounts of pollution, stemming from an economic growth model unfit for our planetary boundaries. Each crisis has its own causes, symptoms and solutions, but finding solutions to each that are scalable, globally relevant, and adequately address all three simultaneously with the urgency required, is an overwhelming challenge.  While it may be unrealistic to imagine a single solution or “silver bullet” will solve the climate crisis, we must nevertheless all lean-in to imagine different ways forward and collaborate with one another to find the macro and micro-solutions that fit together to unlock progress for all of our benefits.

To that end, earlier in June 2023, Swae partnered with the UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) to launch ClimateCall.com, an open-to-all interactive platform to empower new and unheard voices – particularly young people and citizens of the Global South – to propose innovative climate action ideas to decision-makers in the lead up to the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28 UAE), being held in Dubai later in November 2023. 

Climatecall.com is an open problem-solving platform designed to crowdsource and accelerate innovative climate action ideas from around the world. The platform facilitates everyday citizens, especially young people, and communities who will be the most urgently affected by climate change around the world to propose new solutions in three climate challenge areas: Food Security, Water Scarcity, and Renewable Energy.

Turning Ideas into Practical Solutions 

The goal of this platform is to give ideas a place to go, and a process to be turned into action. 

As innovative ideas pour in, the highest-rated ideas will go through successive stages of refinement and selection by a panel of expert judges, and the most promising ideas will receive 25,000 AED in funding; exposure to decision-makers at various global impact platforms (including at the COP28 conference), and brokered introductions to partners and funding intermediaries through the UICCA network to try to bring the ideas to life. 

Turning Ideas into Practical Solutions 

The goal of this platform is to give ideas a place to go, and a process to be turned into action. 

As innovative ideas pour in, the highest-rated ideas will go through successive stages of refinement and selection by a panel of expert judges, and the most promising ideas will receive 25,000 AED in funding; exposure to decision-makers at various global impact platforms (including at the COP28 conference), and brokered introductions to partners and funding intermediaries through the UICCA network to try to bring the ideas to life. 

The UICCA

The UAE Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) is a non-partisan, climate action entity that has a mandate to bring together members of the public and private sector, including academic institutions and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to drive the UAE’s commitment towards net zero by 2050. In the lead-up to the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP28 UAE), the UICCA was mandated with establishing an independent body to advise COP on collaboration, cooperation and innovation. Climatecall.com is one example of direct innovation towards useful solutions and recommendations to decision-makers. Outside of this example, the UICCA operates as a think tank, and advisory resource, providing advice and recommendations to a range of stakeholders on positive climate action that facilitates the transition to a green economy. Included in its mandate, the UICCA facilitates international business, innovation and technology partnerships that work towards the common goal of tackling climate change.

Swae

Swae is a platform for organization-wide ideation, crowdsourcing, and decision-making.  Swae’s AI and bottom-up collaborative features encourage users to contribute ideas to improve any organization or suggest solutions to emerging and topical challenges. The best and most debated ideas bubble up to a review by management automatically. Decisions are made on the platform ensuring a strong feedback loop, reinforcing trust, transparency, and engagement. 

With over 50,000 users, Swae creates a secure, inclusive, and anonymous space for problem-solving within organizations, enabling leaders to tap into their workforce’s creativity to address pressing challenges and improve overall performance.

Since launching in 2019, Swae has been implemented for clients like the United Nations, Etihad Airways, Bosch, Doctors without Borders, Lifelabs, EMC Insurance, and the governments of Mexico and Chile, amongst others.

More to explore…

Boilerplate

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 brings 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.

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Swae Celebrates New Partnership with William and Eugene Eisenman: Experienced Technology Executives & Investors With Winning Track Record of Turning Early-Stage Risk Into Scalable Success

Asano Capital leads the Seed round in Swae

William‌ ‌Eisenman‌‌ is a former Captain in the US ‌Navy‌. He graduated in three years with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Chemistry concurrently. During his first year of college, the Navy was actively recruiting him to join the CBRN division. After joining, he quickly rose through the ranks to become one of the youngest Captains in the Navy at the time. After his time in the military, he transitioned into the technology sector. He has held various executive and leadership roles throughout his career in tech. He is most well-known for his accomplishments at Netflix, where he helped scale the DVD business and was later the creator of the Video Streaming Platform, and at Palm, where he helped create the webOS platform. He is currently is a Co-Founder and GP at Asano Capital.

Eugene Eisenman graduated with a degree in Finance. He briefly worked at Goldman Sachs, and then a small firm doing private secondary transactions and is a Co-Founder and GP at Asano Capital.

William and Eugene, along with their other investment partner, run Asano Capital together. Some of their team’s past successful angel investments include early positions in Netflix, Callaway Golf, MD Pharmaceuticals, and others, reminding us of the Greek myth of Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold (taking all of the positives of that myth into context here).

We’re extremely excited to announce that they have become Swae’s Lead Investors in Swae’s seed round, and we’re ecstatic as to what this partnership will bring to Swae as a whole. Those that invest in Swae become part of our startup family. We develop a strategic and close working relationship with each of our investors so that we can together advance Swae’s platform and offer to develop more powerful ways to bring value to the world.

Already, William and Eugene have spent countless hours conducting due diligence on Swae, reviewing the code base of the platform, UX/UI, and AI systems. They’ve shared important feedback and will continue doing so since William and Eugene will also be joining Swae’s Advisory Board, bringing his years of experience to bear on important strategic decisions.

We believe William and Eugene will be a vital source of intelligence for improving Swae’s platform, offering, user experience, and developing innovations outside of our existing roadmap. Soushiant Zanganehpour, CEO of Swae, sat down with William and Eugene Eisenman to learn more about their decision to invest in Swae, and the interview is below. In the interview, we learn about who the duo are and what potential and hidden value they saw in Swae that compelled them to lead our Seed Round. Their unique outlook and support to help Swae exceed its goals in 2021 is a thrilling start to the new year!

An Interview with William and Eugene Eisenman, Lead Investors at Asano Capital

With Founder & CEO of Swae, Soushiant Zanganehpour @Soushiant

What’s next for Swae

We send a big thank you to William and Eugene for sitting down with Soushiant to share openly about who they are and why they’re investing in Swae. All of us here at Swae are extremely excited to start working on our bigger goals to make our platform all the more powerful and of value to our customers.

A big goal for our technology team, is how Swae can integrate with other team collaboration and project management tools in 2021. We’re looking at integrations with Microsoft Teams, Slack, Asana, etc. This is one of the many goals we hope to accomplish this year.

Our mission is to empower unheard voices within organizations to ensure that leaders can identify problems and hear investable solutions quickly, and hear the truth of what’s going on in an organization so they can reduce the amount of bias present in important strategic decisions.

We know Swae can have a major impact on large companies on many levels, and truly transform the way leaders include others in sourcing challenges, finding solutions, and making better decisions faster. We know that some problems within large organizations can’t be discovered unless you have everyone’s input.

And, the truth is, the impact that COVID-19 has had on businesses globally is going to be the “new normal” as we move forward, there’s no going back. So companies need to be positioned to get stronger during this time, not weaker, and Swae is a technology that can’t be ignored.

Swae is helping organizations across the world to solve today’s problems, create tomorrow’s strategy and make decentralized decisions more easily.

From Startups to Enterprises to DAOs, our clients find that their greatest resource is their people, and Swae is proven to help get the best from this untapped potential.

Find your next winning ideas using Swae

More to explore…

The combination of Swae’s methodology and features helps organizations include as many voices as they like, benefit from the collective intelligence that resides within, but only pick the best ideas that survive through the process and meet the pre-set improvement metrics determined by decision-makers. This ensures the process remains efficient and useful for the organization while baking in meritocracy so that ideas that are “decision-ready” graduate to a management review to receive the attention they deserve.

For 2 years now, we’ve helped many companies like Bosch, Etihad Airways, and Doctors Without Borders [and more] dramatically increase the number of investment-ready decisions, business-wide engagement, and user participation.

Swae is used globally by over 25,000+ humans in large teams, corporations, and smart cities. Most who use Swae believe Swae’s process helps efficiently tap into the imagination and initiative of the people in an organization’s ranks while removing the bureaucratic wall they often hit when they propose new solutions.

If you’d like a demo and a chat with our team, please click here.

Key Topics: #employeeengagement #collaboration #innovation #operations 

How Swae is helping IdentityNORTH adapt their conference experience to a virtual summit due to the Covid-19 crisis

Over the past month, we’ve had the good fortune of meeting Krista Pawley and the incredible team from Imperative Impact, which is a high-touch advisory firm specializing in helping organizations design great cultures and stronger brands.

Imperative Impact designs and produces IdentityNORTH — a series of events and a community of innovators at the epicenter of digital identity and the digital economy of Canada. Leaders, companies, and big thinkers come together to in IdentityNORTH conferences to share and learn about the innovations that are shaping Canada’s digital future.

Their events touch on topics such as:

• Digital ID & Authentication
• Identity & Access Management (IAM) and Consumer Identity (CIAM)
• The Digital Economy
• Digital Transformation
• Blockchain Tech
• The “Internet of Things”
• Emerging Standards and Technology
• And many others…

How Swae is helping IdentityNORTH adapt their conference experience to a virtual one due to the COVID-19 crisis

This year, due to the risks and restrictions placed around large gatherings due to the COVID-19 crisis, IdentityNORTH has changed the flagship in-person summit into an entirely virtual experience.

To ensure an equally positive and high-value experience for their participants online, IdentityNORTH partnered with Swae to bring the conference participants a pre-conference ideation and collaboration tool to help empower their virtual summit.

How Swae will be utilized for the virtual summit

In the weeks leading up to the conference as attendees register, they are invited to participate in co-creating the agenda for a portion of the conference, allowing the agenda to accurately reflect the attendee’s interests and learning goals.

Using the Swae platform, attendees submit proposals for the “UnConference” portion of the event, sharing their big ideas for collaboration on the platform with other attendees. Together they will be able to select and join in on the conversation to vote for the ideas that interest them the most. The agenda ideas that gain the most crowdsourced comments, critical feedback, and votes by attendees are reviewed by the IdentityNORTH executive team and finalized based on a transparent set of criteria and metrics.

The successful ideas and topics that are chosen and approved on the platform are turned into breakout sessions, essentially allowing the audience to dictate the content for the second day of the conference.

The Swae platform allows conference organizers like IdentityNORTH to effortlessly gather ideas from the community to co-create the content while allowing attendees to have the ability to directly impact and shape the agenda. Rather than the typical one-directional survey, participants will be utilizing Swae to co-create ideas while allowing communities and groups to crowdsource ideas and make inclusive decisions seamless.

The conference will take place from June 17–18, 2020, and all of us here at Swae are very excited about this partnership and the potential of supporting other conference organizers like IdentityNORTH. This is a huge opportunity to offer more inclusive experiences for attendees and conference organizers alike.

Here’s how this all comes together: 

If you desire to co-create your conference in the same way, click below and let us know more about you to set up a conversation with the Swae team!

WANT TO STAY IN TOUCH WITH SWAE TO SEE HOW WE’RE CHANGING HOW DECISION-MAKING HAPPENS AND DRIVING INNOVATION?

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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

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

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 Swae, Adapt-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.