Introduction

In December 2018, the UNICEF Innovation Fund on-boarded its largest round of portfolio investments of thirteen startup companies using frontier technology solutions to address complex challenges and create fairer opportunities for children and young people. OS City joins the Blockchain portfolio- these investments are part of UNICEF's larger blockchain explorations of using smart-contracts for organisational efficiencies, creating distributed decision-making processes, and working to build knowledge and understanding of distributed ledger technology both in the United Nations and in the countries where UNICEF works.

Using the newest technologies, we help institutions to leapfrog the digitization process and go straight to the most secure, portable and, interoperable digital documents to regain trust. Our platform allows governments to have continuous access to new and better data.

As data comes in, the platform automatically adapts and improves itself to the given locality, providing a  tailored service. The more it’s used, the better the service it can provide. By facilitating the government to certify information using a blockchain platform for data on subsidies, procurements, purchases and many other transactions, we’re not only building a much more trustable public administration but also a very efficient one.

Along with Prince Consulting (a smart cities consulting company), we’ve found the perfect partnership to build human capacity on emergent technologies and deliver technological solutions into the public sector.

Equivalent to  platforms like iOS or Android, we're building the "govstore" allowing governments to have their own marketplace of accessible and powerful software solutions.

In a world, where 3 million people move to cities every week, we can not keep our centuries-old governance models. We seek to assist governments in making faster decisions to keep up with the pace of change.

The combination of AI and blockchain is paving the road towards new ways of governance, and making it open-source is allowing a developer community to create more ways of leveraging faster government modernization.

Frontier tech & Open Source

Think of Wordpress, almost half of the web has been built atop of their open-source platform. They made building websites fast and easy using a plug-n-play approach with plugins coming from all over the world. If we want to make government innovation fast and easy, we must think of being open, and allow everyone around the world to contribute. Open-source is why Wordpress created an amazing marketplace of plugins, or why Android’s Playstore or Apple’s AppStore got populated. So it makes our solution better by making it possible to have continuous access to new and better software solutions.

We have been active participants of communities that have helped us to understand the importance of modernizing governments to ensure a sustainable future. We are aware of the dangers of governments being left apart and masses of people being at risk of manipulation, or worse, irrelevance. In frontier technologies, we see tools to address global challenges.

Team & diversity

We’re a solid partnership between two firms, OSCity a technology company from Mexico and Prince Consulting a smart cities consultancy company from Argentina, with experience in civic technology, open governance, and technology addressing public challenges such as citizen participation and transparency. Our background combines public policies and software development, including a team of designers and engineers with MSc and PhD in intelligent systems and robotics, data scientists, and political scientists with experience in ICT policies and public innovation.

Together we’re brains and muscles in politics and technology. We believe that our value lies in combining experience in technology development plus knowledge about public policies and the functioning of the public sector. These complimentary views on the same problem is what differentiates us, what makes our diversity so powerful.

Our team has decades of experience in consulting with Latin America´s governments on topics like technology, democracy, modernization, transparency and civic technology. Essentially, we combined the two firms into a perfect partnership to build human capacity on emergent technologies and deliver technological solutions into the public sector.

Way ahead

With UNICEF´s Innovation Fund we plan to enhance our technology focusing on UX/UI for the ease of adoption. Additionally, this  investment is useful for freemium implementations, covering expenses for pilot projects including fixed costs, tech development salaries, traveling and positioning events. After this, our for-profit business model seeks to scale up by licensing technology, selling intelligence and data services to city-state governments and engaged businesses, and monetizing raw data.

We expect to be able to dilute further development costs through the open-source developer community, so that our technological offer can keep growing without necessary demanding for further investments.

Working on blockchain projects together with other startups will allow us to move faster in experiences that demonstrate the value of this technology. As we’re exploring frontier technologies, it’s important to be able to share challenges, tools and experiences among all startups, making it so important for us to work with other open source models.

Photo Credits | Top & In Article: © OS City