Swae gains Developer Access to OpenAI’s invite-only GPT-3 API to accelerate its existing AI capabilities

Swae gains Developer Access to OpenAI’s invite-only GPT-3 API to accelerate its existing AI capabilities

Jan 12, 2022 | Announcements, Press Releases

January 12, 2022 | For Immediate Release

SWAE & OPEN AI ANNOUNCEMENT

Swae gains Developer Access to OpenAI’s invite-only GPT-3 API to accelerate its existing AI capabilities 

Swae, a Vancouver-based technology startup that provides organizations with an idea management and decision-making platform, has been granted developer access through a rigorous application-only process to OpenAI’s GPT-3, the most powerful artificial intelligence natural language model available today.

Swae’s AI capabilities will be powered by GPT-3, the most powerful language model to date.

Swae: Powered by GPT-3

OpenAI’s GPT-3 is an advanced AI language model that produces “natural language”. It currently generates an average of 4.5 billion words per day, and according to OpenAI, there are 300 or so applications globally that have been granted access to build their AI capacities leveraging GPT-3.  

Swae’s platform utilizes a proprietary process combining AI, collective intelligence or wisdom of the crowd, and anonymity to help more marginalized voices bring ideas forward from the bottom to the top, to reveal trapped insights and solutions, disrupting the traditional and more hierarchical process of decision-making found within most organizations.

Gaining developer access to the API not only gives Swae’s developers the ability to leverage advanced AI capabilities to complement the existing algorithms in the platform, but Swae’s users benefit from this sophisticated technology to further improve the quality of their ideas

Pictured left 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. All of these improvements happen to the idea prior to crowd editing and review, to ensure the ideas have the best possibility

 

The specific features Powered by GPT-3  that will be integrated within Swae platform include “title suggestion” and “text generation/paraphrasing”. These enhanced features will allow users to generate more punchy and attractive titles for their creative ideas, while helping them rephrase complicated sentences into more direct and succinct sentences. We believe democratizing access to advanced written editing and communication skills through AI will help level the playing field in terms of ability to create well written proposals. In return, decision makers will be better able to engage their whole workforce and receive diverse and well-written solutions to the biggest challenges their organizations face both today and tomorrow, all from the bottom-up. 

We are thrilled to integrate GPT-3 into our platform. The OpenAI API will allow Swae to continue on our mission to give everyone a voice, allowing organizations to uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within. We also have a shared dedication and commitment with OpenAI to developing AI safely and responsibly.


Soushiant Zanganehpour Founder & CEO

AI continues to transform industries and will allow for entirely new ones to emerge. We at Swae are keen on creating and using state-of-the-art tech to to give everyone a voice, transforming how people collaborate and participate in decision-making processes in any organization.

AI helps the ideas formed through Swae’s “proposals”, stand a greater chance of being successful/implemented. A range of NLP algorithms help users write a stronger pitch for whatever creative solution or issue they wish to raise with others in their organizations. One of the biggest barriers to having a seat at the table, is a lack of clear and compelling communication skills, and we’re hoping to solve this with our particular use of AI. The addition of GPT-3 into our portfolio of AI solutions will open many possibilities based on text generation. OpenAI’s latest model can create text of unparalleled fluidity and contextual awareness. We are happy to announce that Swae can now create catchy titles for your ideas and paraphrase entire paragraphs at a click of button, thanks to integrations with OpenAI’s newest API. Our engineering team is also prototyping new exciting features that could change the way you think about writing your proposal, so stay tuned for future announcements! 

All this, together with our proprietary AI solutions for emotion, sentiment, readability and bias detection (coming soon) will allow Swae to set a new standard in collaborative ideation and bottom-up decision-making.”


Vlad Sokol Head of AI & Engineering 

GPT-3 is the most powerful language model ever. Its predecessor, GPT-2, was already able to spit out convincing streams of text in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening sentence. But GPT-3 is a big leap forward.

The model has 175 billion parameters (the values that a neural network tries to optimize during training), compared with GPT-2’s already vast 1.5 billion. And with language models, size really does matter.

-MIT Technology Review

FOFO business leaders not listening
Elon Mush
Elon Mush

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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Closing seed round enables Swae to expand its scalable innovation and decision-making platform

Closing seed round enables Swae to expand its scalable innovation and decision-making platform

Jan 6, 2022 | Press Releases

FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENT

Closing seed round enables Swae to expand its scalable innovation and decision-making platform

6 January 2022 | For Immediate Release

Swae, a Vancouver-based technology startup that provides organizations with an idea management and decision-making platform, announces the close of a $750K CAD seed funding round – a 50% increase from the initial $500K offer – to help further its mission of giving everyone a voice, and allowing organizations to uncover and benefit from the untapped collective intelligence from within.

Swae’s end-to-end idea management and decision-making solution uses a proprietary process to turn voices into decision-ready solutions for organizations, delivering real value for all kinds of customers. 

Over the past 12 months, the results from implementing Swae for various clients speak for themselves: 

– $1M USD average value of innovation ideas revealed over 12 month
– 50% increase in sourcing investable decisions
– 3 month payback period
– 70% increase in engagement (compared to other experiments and efforts to date)

The funding will help the company expand its tech-stack, increase its feature offerings and integrations, and explore new areas of AI while aggressively ramping up its go-to-market and global presence, with the goal of servicing new clients in the North American and UK markets.

“We’re grateful to our investors – small and large – for helping us create a future where inclusion and bottom-up decision-making will be a source of competitive advantage”,, says Soushiant Zanganehpour, Swae’s Founder & CEO. ”We have a shared vision of helping organizations dramatically improve engagement, source unrevealed solutions, and quickly adapt to changing external circumstances. Our thanks go to William Eisenman (his son Eugene and their Family Office), Global Market Enterprises, Tres Monos Capital, VentureSouq (Conscious Collective Fund), Cordelia Capital alongside many strategic angels and senior executives from Fortune 500 companies.”

 

The Future of Work and Need for Swae

The world has changed irreversibly over the last two years – the unexpected and continuous interruption brought forward by the COVID-19 pandemic (and all subsequent mutations) combined with powerful social and technological forces have dramatically reshaped the workplace for the long term.  

Remote working is increasingly the “new norm”,  peer-to-peer collaboration has been digitized, inclusion and diversity have transformed into must-haves in today’s workplace, and many organizations continue to struggle with digitally transforming processes while maintaining engagement through this turbulent period. Furthermore, talented employees are increasingly willing to leave jobs and industries that have too often treated them as dispensable or excluded them from meaningful changes and decisions inside the workplace. 

During this period of long term instability and uncertainty, employees increasingly want more transparency around decisions, and want to be heard in their workplace. Unfortunately the current set of options provided to them to have a voice – including surveys, polls, and the like – fall significantly short on fulfilling their demands.   Leveraging the wisdom of Steve Jobs on this topic, “to retain the best employees, organizations have to be run by ideas, not hierarchies,” and have to demonstrate that ideas can turn into action. The best managers and organizations will want to create systems to listen and reveal bottom-up ideas while turning them into appropriate solutions so they can reap the rewards. The best ideas have to win.

As competition for talent intensifies in today’s climate, and social and technology forces continue converging to disrupt organizations and workflows daily, organizations must embrace new concepts and technologies to adapt to the times. Companies and investors are eager for solutions that can help organizations adapt quickly to these ever-changing conditions and facilitate leadership on these issues.

Swae’s Traction and Impact 

Swae’s platform is well positioned to support organizations in these turbulent times, improving the traditional way organizations problem-solve, allowing them to crowdsource and leverage the hidden solutions using the knowledge and wisdom from within by providing a bottom-up approach that fuels innovation to tackle our increasingly complex landscape. 

While every organization needs innovation and inclusion capabilities, successful customers are those who are looking to combat disruption with innovative ideas, want transparency and equity in decision making and are looking to increase inclusivity within. Swae is proud to have already implemented its platform with the many forward-thinking organizations, a few of which include  LifeLabs, EMC Insurance, Etihad Airways, the United Nations, and Bosch.

Swae customer LifeLabs is Canada’s largest provider of community laboratory services with over 5,700 employees across Canada. 

“Given the circumstances [of Covid-19] that we couldn’t get together as one team physically, Swae gave us the necessary tools to bring all of our teams together in one place to generate ideas, improve ideas collaboratively, and vote on the best ideas, to put forward some tangible and actionable outcomes from the process,” said Haleh Bahrami, VP of Lab Operations.

Haleh Bahrami, VP of Lab Operations at LifeLabs

Creating an environment that facilitates and encourages employees to raise their voices underpins a healthy amount of employee engagement, which feeds natural occurring innovation inside any organization, and the chance to contribute to the innovation agenda in turn drives engagement, boosting productivity and performance. These are all part of a well-oiled flywheel or virtuous cycle –  one cannot be achieved without the others. 

As the link between employee voice, engagement, innovation and organizational performance becomes increasingly clear, companies and investors are eager to find solutions that can help organizations dramatically boost collaboration, source decision-ready solutions, and improve the pace of innovation. 

While every organization needs innovation and inclusion capabilities, successful customers are those who are looking to combat disruption with innovative ideas from within, retaining their best talent and keeping engagement sky-high through a transparent, equitable, and inclusive process for decision-making.

 

Investor Testimonials

William Eisenman, the former Head of Engineering at Netflix, along with his son, Eugene, joined Swae’s recent investment round as Lead Investors.

They also sit on Swae’s Advisory Board, bringing a wealth of experience as executives and investors, specifically with scaling and growth of startups.

Not only do they see Swae as the way of the future for government systems to interact, but see the value in how it takes pinch points out of collaboration, and rebalances diversity in the workplace at the same time.

Swae is poised for the current ‘new normal’ that won’t go away, as well as what the future holds. It’s how business will need to be done for companies that want to avoid disruption.

William Eisenman, Former Head of Engineering at Netflix & Lead Investor

“It is imperative for all organizations to reflect on the importance of their workforce and company culture. The rise of employee activism, and recent, very public, examples have shown the demand for more purposeful cultures have grown louder and the adverse outcomes that arise when management fails to acknowledge such, can be detrimental. 

The Swae team has built a powerful tech-enabled product to meet this “future of work” that is required while driving innovation at the same time. All by providing employees the opportunity to voice their ideas in a coherent and structured manner, bringing value that has been thus far overlooked to the fore.”

Sonia Weymuller, Founding Partner Venture Souq VC and Conscious Collective Fund

 

“As a fellow business owner consistently focused on empowering everyone, I couldn’t help but resonate with a product that addresses a large problem I see in the workforce.   When an organization chooses to listen to its people, the results are extraordinary – from retention, attracting diverse talent to impacting the bottom line by being adaptable to disruption and change. Swae levels the playing field giving everyone a voice in an efficient, transparent way through a channel that should exist within all organizations.”

Alisa Kolodizner, Chief Founding Partner, Cordelia Capital 

 

“I invested in Swae as I believe it revolutionizes organizational decision-making and how those decisions are implemented, while revitalizing employee engagement, buy-in and trust. Many people don’t share their ideas because they don’t know how to formulate them or where to start. Swae has the potential to change how governments, businesses and non-profits make decisions.“

Kia Afshari, Product Management Director at Visier

 

“I invested in Swae  because it gives everyone in an organization a chance to participate, in an honest and open way. C-level executives need to be focused on where to go, and that sometimes disconnects them from the people delivering their vision, they need a tool like this to help them uncover the operational bottlenecks that their staff have to work through on a daily basis. If leadership is truly committed to providing visibility, improving operations, and maximizing staff retention, then they need honest feedback from their staff, I believe that Swae can do this”.

Don Sherrah, Business Development Manager at Deloitte

 

“The current use of Swae, working within larger firms, helps remove layers of bureaucracy and provides a much needed voting system and level of transparency that is often missing. An employee survey just doesn’t do the job anymore and Swae provides a voice to those that need to be heard the most”

Ashkan Golkar, Vice President, RBC Dominion Securities

 

“I invested in Swae because I know there’s a need to harness the power of everyone within companies.”

Martin Ertl, CEO at Recital Software

 

“Collective intelligence can lead to better outcomes in organizations than our current silos and bureaucracy. With a world rapidly incorporating AI into everything, most applications seek to cut the human out of the process– what I appreciate about Swae is that it seeks to augment rather than replace human input.”

Emerson Perez, Sr Informatics Lead at Aetna

 

“I’ve spent so many hours trying to orchestrate ways to get insights that were locked up in my previous teams. If we had had a tool like Swae, I think the outcomes for our company would have been far better.”

Kahran Singh, General Partner at Tres Monos Capital

 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 Wins Top Award at 2021 ExO Transformation Awards

Swae Wins Top Award at 2021 ExO Transformation Awards

Sep 5, 2021 | Latest Swae News

swae-wins-exo-award-2021-transformation-awards

Swae wins 1st place in the 2021 ExO 2021 Transformation Awards in the “New Company” Category (this category is for organizations less than 3 years old at the time of the application that used the “ExO framework” to launch their business).

Silicon Valley’s Salim Ismail, the former Head of Innovation at Yahoo and founder of Silicon Valley innovation hub Singularity University, lays out what he believes makes an exponential organization is (or, as he calls them, an ExO and the driver behind the ExO community and this award) in his Amazon best-seller, Exponential Organizations.

The foundation to this is simple. Rather than increasing human capital or physical assets, the most successful 21st-century companies leverage information and technology to achieve rapid expansion in pursuit of what Ismail calls “Massive Transformational Purpose” (MTP). In doing so, he describes that they’re able to scale their business strategies, culture, framework, and purpose at the same rate as technology.

Swae was chosen as an award winner as a new company that used the ExO framework to launch utilizing four main ExO attributes: algorithms, engagement, dashboards + interfaces, and community + crowd. This “new company” category is for organizations less than 3 years old at the time of the application that used the “ExO framework” to launch their business.

Let’s break these down a bit further as to how Swae uses the Exponential Organization attributes to emulate an Exponential Organization themselves:

Algorithms

Swae’s technology platform leverages NLP algorithms to help its users write better, clearer, more objective, and persuasive proposals for the ideas that they have. This helps users increase their chances of having their ideas heard, collaborated on by other colleagues, and potentially acted upon by leadership. We also plan to use algorithms in the future to help predict what ideas are likely to trend and gain momentum before they actually do, who future leaders might be based on their patterns of engagement, and what the sentiment of the organization may say about future attrition and retention rates.

Engagement

Swae leverages the engagement of the crowd as a filtering function. Engagement fuels the escalation metrics and achievements of the ideas that help efficiently and transparently signal which ideas deserve the attention of leaders/management and review ideas that still need some more work. Updates in the future will include are expansion to use a reputation system and additional gamification elements to keep users interested, involved, and increasingly committed.

Dashboards & Interfaces

Being a SaaS startup, we leverage good UX/UI and dashboards to share pertinent knowledge about user activity on the platform. Our dashboards help managers and leaders get real-time activity and trend information.

Community & Crowd

In the not-so-distant future, Swae will massively leverage the “Community & Crowd” aspect to invite those who are passionate about our MTP to be more directly involved in the main functions of Swae as an organization.

The bottom-line results and key metrics that Swae has achieved as a result of implementing ExO frameworks as a new company launching into the market, Swae was able to:

  1. Increase the Innovation Pipeline sourcing investable innovation ideas

  2. Create impactful Revenue Growth and Cost Reduction opportunities for Swae’s clients

  3. Correlate a direct causal link between positively increasing employees engagement, motivation, happiness, and retention as a consequence of having access to Swae

  4. Create many other intangible benefits

About Swae:

Swae is a SaaS platform that helps turn stakeholder voices into actionable proposals to fuel smarter decision-making and drive organizational innovation and improvement. Our tech helps organizations be radically inclusive while being selective about the ideas that they choose to invest in.

The AI integration that Swae uses helps users turn their suggestions and feedback into well-structured proposals. The combination of collective intelligence features, escalation metrics, and workflows help utilize the crowdsourcing aspect to both help improve ideas collaboratively while filtering the signal from the noise, making innovation discovery much more efficient, meritocratic, transparent, and inclusive.

Swae CEO Speaker for the Persia Educational Foundation’s Webinar Iran 2.0: Exploring AI, Policy and Democracy

Swae CEO Speaker for the Persia Educational Foundation’s Webinar Iran 2.0: Exploring AI, Policy and Democracy

Aug 6, 2021 | Events

Iran 2.0: Exploring AI, Policy and Democracy
Panelists:  Ali Ansari, Afshin Molavi & Soushiant Zanganehpour
When: Wednesday, 18 August, 17:00 – 18:00PM BST (London, UK)
Where: Online Webinar here

Bringing together the worlds of historical insight into Iran and its role in the global community, geoeconomics in the MENA region, as well as artificial intelligence in emergent democratic processes, our panelists will explore how and when we may be able to empower today and tomorrow’s generations to universalise participation, transparency and decision making that impact our lives in a constructive manner. 

YOU’RE INVITED TO THIS FREE EVENT!

Soushiant Zanganehpour, Founder & CEO of Swae, has been invited to speak, and we welcome all to join as it will be streamed online

Persia Education Foundation webinar on Wednesday, 18 August, 5PM BST (London, UK), please click the link below to watch the discussion:

Watch webinar here
Guest Panelists

Ali Ansari

Twitter:  @aa51_ansari  Wikipedia

Ali Massoud Ansari the Professor in Modern History with reference to the Middle East at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is also the founding director of the Institute for Iranian Studies. Hi research explores the history and politics of Modern Iran, including the relationship between Iranian ideologues and Western ideas of development, especially the way in which Iranian intellectuals appropriated, adapted and engaged with narratives of the Enlightenment; the concept of ‘rights’; constitutionalism; and the establishment of the rule of law. His work examines historical consciousness, and the various narratives and mythologies that have shaped contemporary Iranian identity.He is currently the FCO Fellow looking at politics of Brirish-Iranian relations in historical context.

Afshin Molavi

Twitter: @AfshinMolavi Wikipedia

An Iranian-American author, a co-director of the emerge85 Lab, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, and a senior advisor at Oxford Analytica, Molavi is a widely published thinker focussing on global geo-political risk and geo-economics in the Middle East and Asia.

Soushiant Zanganehpour

Twitter:  @Soushiant

A winner of the Global Challenge Price 2017, Zanganehpour’s AI start up, Swae.io, defines a new model for global governance through bottom-up and inclusive decision-making to advance democratic processes that enable the grassroots to voice their concerns and redirect the rise of abuse of power and elitism towards accessing the greater good. An outstanding advocate of informed, meritocratic processes, Zanganehpour promotes better leadership among governments, corporations and communities.

More about the Persia Educational Foundation

Established in 1997, Persia Educational Foundation is a non-governmental UK-registered charity. Its mission is to promote education and advancement of Persian-speaking communities worldwide. It provides knowledge and means to our partners and co-workers in order to encourage open and connected education leading to self-sufficiency and independence.

Persia’s primary target among this population are women and girls. Persia advances that:

  • Only through education individuals and communities can reach their actual and true potential while protecting their rich heritage.
  • Women, as mothers and first educators of the next generation, offer greater potential to impact the community.
  • Promoting and accessing education and training is a universal right and key to achieving Agenda 2030.
  • Education and advancement of women and girls is the key to establishing a culture of peace and prosperity.
View website
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Swae CEO Invited to the Council of Europe’s World Forum Talk: Can Democracy Save the Environment?

Swae CEO Invited to the Council of Europe’s World Forum Talk: Can Democracy Save the Environment?

Aug 6, 2021 | Events

The Council of Europe is the continent’s leading human rights organization.

Soushiant Zanganehpour, Founder & CEO of Swae, has been invited to speak at the Council of Europe’s Forum Talk on Wednesday, 11 August, 4.30 to 6 PM CEST.

This is part of a yearlong campaign to
answer one big question: 

 

“Can Democracy Save the Environment?”

 

This is under the High Patronage of Mr. Emmanuel Macron, President of the French Republic.

This Forum Talk will bring together CEOs, researchers and policy experts, including Swae’s very own Soushiant, to analyze dimensions of the relationship between global environmental challenges, technology and democracy. 

Soushiant will be providing context as to how technology can support and help true democracy in various ways. 

YOU’RE INVITED TO THIS FREE EVENT!

We welcome all to join as it will be streamed online Wednesday, 11 August, 4.30 to 6 PM CEST, please click the link below to watch the discussion:

Watch live here

Theme Description

The unprecedented global ecological challenges posed by climate change and biodiversity loss, among others, raise a range of compelling questions about the intersections between these challenges, the uses and application of current and emerging technology, and the ability of democracies around the world to react effectively to these crises.

On the one hand, current and emerging technology present compelling new solutions to enable better collective responses to the climate and related ecological challenges¾for example, through new systems using the latest technologies to ensure global transparency on GHG emissions and climate action, as well as software and open online viewing platforms to develop and track climate action targets at various levels of governance. More, tailored software, using AI technology, may be used to engage citizens and enhance democratic decision-making around the world in connection with the unprecedented global climate and ecological challenges, as some governments strive to ensure maximal citizen engagement in and commitment to the significant economic and social changes that may be required for required climate/environmental action.

On the other side of the coin, there is currently a transnational problem – threatening, potentially, to undermine the foundations of democracy itself – of technologically-enabled misinformation, disrupting climate action and reducing the capacities of democracies to respond to urgent environmental challenges. How might democracies respond and safeguard vital (global) information ecosystem integrity and ensure citizens around the world get high quality information on ecological challenges?

    

Watch live here

About Forum Talks

The Forum Talk is part of the yearlong campaign: “12 months, 1 Question – Can Democracy Save the Environment?” August will be dedicated to “Technology, the environment and democracy” and a different theme will be addressed each month until November 2021, when we plan to hold a 3 day World Forum gathering to take place in Strasbourg—the largest democracy-focused gathering of its kind.  

The World Forum for Democracy is a unique platform for political decision-makers and activists to debate solutions to key challenges for democracies worldwide. By identifying and analysing experimental initiatives and practices, the Forum highlights and encourages democracy innovations at the grassroots and their transfer on a systemic level, in order to strengthen the foundations of democratic societies.

The Global Governance Forum seeks to promote more effective global governance to achieve unprecedented measures of shared prosperity, health, education, peace and justice, and to safeguard the planetary systems on which we all rely.

MORE DETAILS

The event is organised by the Council of Europe’s World Forum for Democracy in collaboration with the Global Governance Forum and Leiden University, Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, and will consist in presentations from the invited experts followed by interactive discussion and Q&A with participants. 

MODERATOR

Maja GROFF International Lawyer and Convenor of the Climate Governance Commission, Netherlands

SPEAKERS

Amy EAGLESTONE Democracy-Building Expert and Policy Advisor to the Chair of the Dutch Climate Council, Netherlands

Dr. Herb LIN Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and Hank J. Holland Fellow in Cyber Policy and Security, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

Gavin Mc CORMICK Executive Director (WattTime) and Electricity Lead (Climate TRACE)

Tomer SHALIT CPO and Founder of ClimateView

Soushiant ZANGANEHPOUR Founder, CEO at Swae.io

Soushiant is a social scientist, entrepreneur and Founder of Swae.io, an AI-powered platform for smarter organizational decisions and 21st century governance. Swae helps companies, cities and organizations of all sizes benefit from the collective intelligence of their employees, stakeholders and citizens helping source innovative ideas, program and product feedback, and policy, budget, and strategy suggestions, at a fraction of the cost.

Soushiant is a recognized global practitioner in the fields of business innovation, impact investing, social entrepreneurship, and sustainability having spoken at numerous international conferences and published in The Guardian, The Financial Times, Bloomberg Business Week, and Entrepreneur magazines. He is on Harvard Business Review’s Advisory Council, and a board advisor of Biocarbon Engineering, a reforestation start-up using drones to replant a billion trees per year.

Soushiant earned his BA (PoliSci & IR) from the University of British Columbia, a Diplôme in International Affairs from SciencesPo Paris, an MPP (Public Policy & Economics) from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and attended Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program as a Google Scholar. He was awarded a full scholarship by the UK’s Foreign Office as one of four Canadian Chevening Scholars for his Masters

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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

Apr 28, 2021 | 4 min read, Change Management, Client Showcase, Latest Swae News, Organizational Culture, Remote Working & Collaboration

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.

united-nations-and-swae-partner-for-international-public-consultation
 

“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

united-nations-and-swae-partner-for-international-public-consultation

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

united-nations-and-swae-partner-for-international-public-consultation
united-nations-and-swae-partner-for-international-public-consultation
united-nations-and-swae-partner-for-international-public-consultation
united-nations-and-swae-partner-for-international-public-consultation
united-nations-and-swae-partner-for-international-public-consultation

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/

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