Swae for Cities – Bottom-up Decision-Making and Governance

Decision-making in most organizations is broken. Today’s organizations – from governments to corporations and communities – make their most important decisions in a manner that excludes most of their stakeholders from participating meaningfully into the process. Consequently, citizens who feel excluded from decision-making processes, are disengaged, apathetic, and distrustful of institutions.

Combining anonymity, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence, Swae gives users the tools to participate in consequential and complex decisions that impact them – from government policy, community budgets and workplace decisions – while helping decision-makers aggregate the most relevant solutions from distributed sources.

The future will be one where decision-making is more distributed and decentralized, and where communities and organizations rely less on representatives and will be more autonomous and self-managed. Protocols will be supported with AI and other exponential technologies, and Swae is helping usher in this new paradigm by building a bridge to this future.

Today’s most consequential institutions operate through hierarchies, interpret stakeholders’ preferences through periodic election cycles / consultation processes, and make decisions through proportional representation, precluding regular, meaningful, and substantive participation of stakeholders into the process. This model is outdated leading to poorly designed solutions that include structural biases, leaving stakeholders disengaged, while failing to leverage the distributed creativity or expertise of stakeholders into finding unconventional solutions to new challenges.

Globally, outdated democratic institutions face trust deficits and rise in populism. In 2019, Pew  found that 51% are dissatisfied with how democracy is working, and resentful of democratic outcomes. In 2017, the Edelman Trust Barometer found that for the first time in 17 years a decline in trust below 50% across all four social institutions. This is a problem that affects billions, if unaddressed threatens the health and prosperity of our public institutions and democracies, and has systemic consequences.

The advancement of communication technologies challenge old organizational paradigms, enabling direct, instantaneous exchange and the aggregation of distributed intelligence efficiently as input to complex problems. Institutions that fail to update their decision-making processes to leverage modern possibilities hold society back from finding unrevealed and necessary solutions to complex problems.

Swae’s platform helps provide people who are traditionally marginalized or excluded from participating in important and consequential decisions – often due to lack of strong language and presentations skills, lack of time to participate physically, lack of influential networks to access decision-makers or lack of expertise in navigating complex bureaucracies – giving them a chance to be heard, to ensure their unique insights and expertise are articulated effectively and stand a fair chance to influence the agenda.

These people are the primary beneficiaries and they exist in organizations, communities, cities and countries. Other beneficiaries include decision-makers - be they politicians and public policy experts or executives in companies and non-profit organizations - giving them access to collective intelligence and a pipeline of coherent, well-articulated bottom-up proposals, to help make more informed strategy, policy, and resource allocation choices.

To date we have worked with a range of users across  North America, South America, and the Middle East (UAE) in a number of bottom-up decision making scenarios. Some of the organizations we have worked with thus far include:

• Bosch Foundation (Germany)
• Etihad Airways (UAE)
• Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) 
• Association of Cities and Mayors across Chile (Chile) 
• MSF / Doctors without Borders (Canada) 

Swae exists to fundamentally upgrade people’s ability to have a voice in consequential decisions that impact their lives, by connecting disparate insights, preferences, and arguments in a fair, coherent, efficient and meritocratic process, leveraging available and future technologies, to help raise the quality and inclusivity of decisions.  

In today’s digital world, the technological capabilities exist to include as many voices as possible in decision-making, to benefit from broad collective intelligence when arriving at important, high-impact decisions. Swae’s AI-enabled platform allows for mass participation that is efficient and meritocratic, without overburdening decision-makers with added work and noise.

Swae streamlines idea and inputs collection from stakeholders on complex decisions, bringing structure, efficiency and ease to the process. After logging in, Swae guides users through a methodical discovery process to help articulate their idea. Swae gives users the option to anonymize their identity, so they feel more comfortable expressing unconventional or sensitive ideas. After collecting the proposal data from a user, the tool improves the quality of the initial idea with Machine Learning Algorithms (NLU and NLP functions), such as language improvement, bias recognition, evidence suggestion, structural adjustments, concept matching. These functions act as a human-like proposal editor to strengthen the quality and effectiveness of the original idea.

Once the improvements have been approved by the user, the idea is uploaded onto the platform where the community of users belonging to the same organization or city are allowed to weigh in on ideas (anonymously or not), adding important information and deliberating the quality of the proposal. Leveraging their collective wisdom the platform allows management to establish metrics and thresholds to efficiently and meritocraticly conduct due diligence and determine signals from noise. The ideas that receive the most engagement organically escalate up to an expert review, decision or feasibility round, circumventing barriers from getting ideas from the bottom to the top.

By combining anonymity, artificial, and collective intelligence, Swae’s protocol and technology help cities and organizations unleash the creativity of their stakeholders, discover new unrevealed ideas, collectively build bottom-up solutions to directly influence strategy and resource allocation decisions, and improving overall decision quality. Swae’s platform turns the will to participate into a powerful and useful resource for cities and organizations, reducing the costs of sourcing (R&D), improving, and vetting innovative solutions by 5-10x, and preserving scarce management time for more strategic value-adding functions.

There are a handful of competitors working on improving organizational decision-making and governance, whose tools aim to reflect the opinions of masses into key decisions. However, when these tools leverage AI, the end product oversimplifies opinions by synthesizing them into their lowest common denominator so they can be absorbed by management. As a result, these tools cannot ensure that management will act on the views or demonstrate the extent to which those views are shared by others in the organization or community, which severely limits engagement in the first place. 

Swae’s tool is the only one that combines three complementary functions - anonymization, AI, and crowd deliberation - to augment bottom- up expression, helping tap into the abundance of collective intelligence in a structured, manageable and efficient way, helping make decentralized input a productive complement to centralized decision-making. 

Swae NLU/NLP algorithms help improve the quality of the initial solution, functioning as a proposal editor, to strengthen the proposal’s effectiveness. They suggest improved language formulation, internal/external data supporting the user's case, as well as uncover biases that could undermine the proposal's strength. Integrating NLP algorithms provides users efficiency gains in written expression, allowing disparate voices within an organization to augment their communications abilities and enhance their ability to influence the organizational agenda and strategy, levelling the playing field, so those with poorer language skills who do have valid insights can also have an equitable chance at making their ideas heard for the benefit of the collective decisions.

Swae utilizes NLU, NLP and other machine learning algorithms for two purposes: 

1) provide efficiency gains in written expression, helping improve the quality of the initial solution functioning as a proposal editor. It suggests improved language formulation, data supporting the user's case, as well as uncover biases that could undermine the proposal's strength. This allows disparate and unheard voices within a city to augment their communications abilities and enhance their ability to influence the agenda; 

2) using deep learning techniques on an existing set of proposals in the repository of an organization and a training set of proposals that focus on multidimensional variables that are intrinsic (language, supporting evidence and persuasiveness), and extrinsic (team size, decision-makers’ track record of approving proposals, budgetary constraints, etc.), our algorithms evaluate the probability of success of new proposals as well as making suggestions along the proposal development process to improve its likelihood of success.  Successful proposals are fed back into the AI engine for reinforcement learning to optimize the implicit rules and improve the performance of the AI engine. Overtime, the accuracy of the algorithm will be enhanced by exposing it to additional proposals across organizations. Additionally, the learning algorithm will be leveraged in a generative capacity to offer suggestions based on historical success data to improve the likelihood of success for new proposals.

After studying experiments attempting to improve the inclusivity and quality of decisions in employee engagement, stakeholder consultation, crowdsourcing, participatory budgeting, and big data decision-support fields, Swae observed two recurring problems and deliberately designed its AI to address both; 

1. When AI big data has been leveraged to better understand stakeholders’ preferences, the outcome has been quite inaccurate, deductive, oversimplifying the collective's expression and preferences into soundbites for management’s absorption. 
2. When the process attempts to be highly inclusive and participatory, research reveals that the process inadvertently favours an already privileged socio-economic group of stakeholders (i.e. usually older, middle-aged, middle-class white men/women) who have better language skills and more time to participate physically in experiments or programs. Their better language skills allows them to better present their ideas and capture the attention of masses. They in turn disproportionately influence the number and range of options considered for decisions. 

We believe AI can be used to level the playing field, so those with poorer language skills who do have valid insights can also have an equitable chance at making their ideas heard for the benefit of the collective decisions.

Swae is currently used by over 5,000 people and offered to over 50,000 (across all client integrations) 

In one year, we’ll be serving up to 500,000-1,000,000 people.

In five years, we hope number will be as high as 100,000,000-1,000,000,000+.

If we have succeeded in our mission, bottom-up idea generation will become a standard operating norm in leading cities and companies. The most innovative cities use Swae’s software for inclusive policy design and participatory budgeting, allocated 30-50% of city budgets this way because of the strong causal links between Swae’s decision-making process and policy innovation and success; talent attraction; and economic prosperity. 

The most innovative global companies will begin remodelling their organizational and management structures to adapt to a more collaborative bottom-up decision making protocol, because Swae’s technology helped reduce the probability of decision-failure. It will be a highly coveted employee benefit (a big part of charts like this). It will become one of the top five perks talent seek when joining a company or will be a highly sought after opportunity for global mobile talent and potential citizen who are selecting cities to relocate to and invest in.

Our goals within 12 months year are to

• 1M users / day
• $1M ARR
• launch Swae 2.0 web app
• launch beta users program
• Raise a seed round
• Recruit COO

Our goals within the next five years are to 

• 500M users/day
• $50M ARR
• Swae is present in Top 40 smart cities globally (in each continent) 
• Swae is present in Top 10 leading companies globally (in each continent)
• Expand the team to 50 people
• Open offices in London, San Fransisco, Nairobi, Beijing 
• Revolutionize decision-making and make it a norm for decision making to be a decentralized, inclusive experience. 

Financial: With our burn rate, we currently have enough runway for 1 year, but need more to expand to the magnitude we are aiming for.

Legal: As we continue to roll out pilots, working with governments can be challenging because they often have strict restrictions and rules we must work alongside. Because of the many processes within governments, communication and progress is often slower. 

Technical: Building a complicated and nuanced app with an outsourced tech team 12 hours from your headquarters presents logistical and communication challenges. Communicating nuances has to be done through multiple channels. This often delays the creation of features, delaying how quickly you move, but the risk is building features that do not reflect the nuances, creating more clean up work to the code base and UI. On top of this, for the algorithms to reach the level of complexity we are aiming, will require both more time and technical effort as we continue to train the AI engine. 

Cultural: While some regions have the right intentions to innovate and develop products and services, there are still legacy systems, cultures and mindsets that constrain potential and limit the extent to which that region competes with global standards when it comes to customer centricity, cost, long-term thinking, appreciation of risk, and innovation tolerance.

Financial: Identify sources of funding and apply to grants, funds, competitions, etc.

Technical: Localize the tech team. Improve systems and processes to reduce shipping time of features.

Legal: As we try to implement Swae with various governments and legal systems, it is crucial to that we comply with the regulations that apply to us, to reinforce trust in the system.

Cultural: We will continue to gather complementary research that validates our hypotheses. If we are able to show that we understand and have considered the risks and challenges of bottom-up innovation, yet continue to believe in that it is the future of democracy, we will be able to build our credibility.

Full-Time: 7

Part-Time: 2

Contractors: 1

Very strong team with the core skills to execute on a unproven concept.

Our CEO and Founder, Soushiant Zanganehpour, is a successful entrepreneur and social scientist with over 12 years of experience working as an entrepreneur, strategy consultant and policy analyst in Canada, the UK, France and the UAE. He is an Alumnus of Singularity University and a UK Foreign Office Chevening Scholar who has built his career in positions of responsibility working on problems at the intersection of public policy, business, technology, and systems change. He has expertise in organizational and systems design, governance modelling, decentralized systems and incentives design and experienced in seed stage investing. He self-funded 3 previous startups, growing one to profitability and a buy-out from co-founder/partner. 

Our CTO, Su Yon Sohn is an accomplished software engineer with over 11 years of experience in delivering cutting edge technical solutions for diverse sectors including startups, public institutions, enterprises, and remote communities. She has led a core engineering team in a bootstrapped startup to growth and successful exit in the past. She holds a Master of Digital Media and Bachelor of Fine Arts in Film Production. The combination of her technical expertise in software development, professional engagement in all levels of public and private organizations, and interdisciplinary educational background makes her a perfect person to execute the technical aspect of Swae and solve the problem with unique perspectives.

We have completed pilots with Médecins Sans Frontières (also known as Doctors without Borders) in Canada, Bosch Alumni Network in Germany, and Educate forLife (global). We are continuing to monitor how these organizations use Swae, and support them where we can. 

We currently have a live pilot with Etihad Airways. They are using Swae to to harness the collective creativity of the organization by allowing employees to propose and innovate solutions to address Etihad’s ongoing business challenges and untapped opportunities. 

We are also currently working with CMinds, a tech-for-impact organization, and the local government of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, to roll out a pilot in Augustcc. Our goal with this pilot is to give the citizens of Ciudad Juárez more of a voice within their community, and to increase local participation. The city has a history of violence, and we want to help shift the narrative to of the city to one of innovation and community. 

Our key customers and beneficiaries are people who are traditionally marginalized or excluded from participating in important and consequential decisions, often due to lack of strong language and presentations skills; lack of time to participate physically; lack of influential networks to access decision-makers; or lack of expertise in navigating complex bureaucracies. These people exist in organizations, communities, cities and countries. Other beneficiaries include decision-makers—be they politicians and public policy experts, or executives in companies and non-profit organizations.

Our product combines anonymity, artificial intelligence, and collective intelligence, to give users the tools to participate in consequential and complex decisions that impact them. We give marginalized or excluded people a chance to be heard, to ensure their unique insights and expertise are articulated effectively and stand a fair chance to influence the agenda. We give decision-makers access to collective intelligence and a pipeline of coherent, well-articulated bottom-up proposals, to help make more informed strategy, policy, and resource allocation choices.

We partner with organizations and governments who believe in the mission of Swae, and want to support bottom-up decision making in their community. We build and customize the Swae platform to best fit their needs, and they then distribute it through their channels. 

Our pricing model is being finalized and consider pricing based on a combination of variables including: # of users, # of management users, duration, # of successfully graduated decisions. 

A combination of revenue from successful integrations into cities and organizations, and grants for research, development, monitoring, evaluation and impact studies.