The New World of Work and Business: The Era of Collaboration

So proud to share this week's episode of #TechForGood Series with Andrés Hernández. Andres takes us on a journey through the ?? world of collaboration, its history, and its evolution in three periods. The first phase focuses on participation and a shared interest in cooperating and developing trust ??; the second phase is marked by mutual recognition of common goals ??, and the third phase is marked by the resolution of joint cooperative projects that engages and propels communities around specific ideas and shared problems ??.

So many learnings with his interview ??, interweaving from the human dimension, the technologies, and the role of data in the sophistication of these communities and platforms. But also, the need to build data governance models that generate traceability, trust, and virtuous growth. Blockchain is a beacon of hope in this need for transparency and accountability for interaction, value, and collective construction of these new public goods on the network.

Andres has had a remarkable career, starting in the field of music ??, electronics, and software development ????, working with Microsoft, Google, business consulting, the co-founding of various companies and technology products, as well as in the applications of new technologies to solve humanity's problems, all based on a genuine curiosity, a passion for knowledge, trust, and collective compatibility of values to solve outstanding problems.

?? A unique conversation embracing the complexity between the philosophical, the social, and the technical dimension of collaboration in our world today.?

He leaves us with one Burning question! ?? “How do we move from trust-building to intentional collaborative spaces that can impact common or even dissimilar goals that can be supported by collective strength using mixed (digital and physical) spaces as a connection point?

It's key to get these elements to drive us to be able to connect with more people around specific topics, allowing a level of development and advancement on complex issues. Undoubtedly this is the best time to solve complexity from collective capabilities!"

?#trust #collaboration #community #inclusivegrowth #tech4good

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Nelly.?Hi Andres, good morning. Thank you very much for participating in this edition of the #TechForGood Series. Super grateful that you are here in this space to talk about something that I know you are very passionate about. I also know that you are one of the few people who has authentically practiced and developed the concept in practice and theory of collaboration.?

And why the topic of collaboration in a space where we talk about technology?

That is something that you are undoubtedly going to explain a little better. Still, it is because we see the release of new applications and platforms recurrently. It seems as if by osmosis, they will reach the users, and the community will be created. The idea is going to be attractive. Little is said when undertaking a technology project of launching a new initiative about what the principles will be and how collaboration will nurture that technology, that platform, or that idea will be expressed.??

So to talk a little bit about this topic, about you and your trajectory, which is extremely interesting for anyone interested in the world of technology and the business world, the world of startup growth, business growth, and development. One of your great superpowers is knowing how to grab ideas and transform them into realities.

So thank you very much and if you want to start, tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, a citizen of the world, and how you came to the topic of collaboration and technology.

Andres. Great Nelly! What a pleasure to share this space with you; I've always admired everything you do but am particularly moved by this #TechForGood Series process that I think is fundamental to telling good stories in an organized, clear, and massive way to achieve this recognition of people and companies that are achieving amazing results through really creating collaborative models that suddenly emerge invaluable businesses around super important and social problems;

Everything we can do like research and awareness about these companies is wonderful. I'm just a fan of the face here. I come from a hunger to understand things from a very young age. One of the things I remember about myself is a great motivation to listen to older adults, which is crazy, isn't it??

It's a hobby to have good conversations with older adults who seem to me to be the natural representation of the trajectory, learning, and development. So I could end up saying of wisdom that we can not necessarily always fulfill that, but of that experience that collects the best learning process that is the experiences.?So from that, I was very motivated by some things in my life; one of those was the bible to say proverbs and the deep discussions around understanding topics, the concept of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. And later in my life, I was in a regular school. At the same time, I was in a music conservatory, and at night I studied electronics.?So that leads me how to begin to delve into technology. So this is where it enters an essential part of deepening technology at an early age in a certain way required to understand things, find digested concepts, the knowledge that was not so easy to access and in fact, from there we will start a little technology and collaboration. So I think from there it was born a little bit when I studied music, music production, I was motivated to understand things, I could only find in a correct or little digested way collaborative communities around it, and basically, I started to participate in many forums when I was 12-13 years old because I wanted to deepen the understanding of music - I was studying at the same time electronics - then diagrams; even in electronics there are small pieces that are not easy to find anywhere.?

So at the end of the day, the only way to get to that was to be able to talk to someone in China, Hong Kong, or whatever country that could reveal to me how they had arrived at that answer. So from there, I started to get involved in technology and collaboration.

I'm going to make a breakthrough in life -to observe my introduction- but from there, I started to participate in many spaces, that led me to study electronics, then I learned software development, after that, I entered Microsoft, then I experienced in consulting processes, management consulting, I began to participate in a community that I will talk about now, which is divine or that seems to me to be a fascinating essence around entrepreneurship that emerged in 2010-2008 called Startup Weekend. Seedstars, now in the organization for a while, I return to consulting. I gave myself a sabbatical and joined Google for a few years.

So that's where my trajectory comes from, how collaboration emerges, and understanding how to achieve it more efficiently. I don't know if it's the best or the worst way. Still, it leads me to be deeply involved in different spaces facilitated by technology in many ways. That leads me to begin to deepen my understanding of the principles of effective collaboration toward technology and economic development.

I participated and generally had roles that allowed me to know the entire Latin American region. I saw the challenges for entrepreneurs who were in the early stages, who were growing their businesses, and even larger ones, who had difficulties in deciphering complex issues. I must say, they required the input of multiple actors to solve that. There were no simple ways to do it. I think that has evolved, certainly in recent times, due to different factors, but that leads us to make better use of the collective knowledge crowd in more efficient ways.

I end up in Google and all those spaces because I have always been a fan, basically an intellectual vagabond. Hence, it leads me to be a fan of knowledge. Being a fan of knowledge also makes me very excited and fond of people with good ideas. This connects a lot with the other capacity that I have developed a lot, which is the part of the strategy and product development -product management and product strategy- which is what has strengthened a lot in my professional career until today and that naturally, I have everything to evolve from how much there is to learn day by day.

N. And from this, it seems that the transversal line in your evolution and what you have done, what you have developed, is indeed collaboration. Since this word is like the word democracy, like love, they are used a lot, but we rarely know exactly what they refer to, what collaboration is and what is not.

A. Sure, first maybe if we go deeper to try to ask the question, what is it? It would probably lead us to ask ourselves how a collaborative process is built because the act of definition is always closely linked to this definition.

When I started to question this, I must say, the semantic definition is quite explicit. It is collaboration of collaborate, which is basically together we work, we can execute things, and the evolution of that can lead us to cooperation, which in theory is how this evolution not only we work together, but we achieve objectives, but that could leave us in a pretty specific space of the definition of collaboration. But when we think about the complexity of achieving a process of working together, we start to have to challenge ourselves; how do you develop effective collaboration? And?I was asking myself those questions when we were very challenged. I was just at Microsoft - I think about 12-14 years ago, I don't remember - and we were very challenged about?

How do we manage to encourage all these great technologists to have a more effective process toward technological-entrepreneurial development in a certain way?

So when we started to try to create these processes or strengthen them, I had already come from a thousand forums, from how many point-to-point platforms existed between 1998 and 2005, when the point-to-point transfer protocols exploded.?

But what I was thinking about there was:

?-Collaboration emerges in three stages (which is what I find very challenging).

First, it is born from a common interest. The first thing taken is the point of connection to start dreaming. An effective collaboration process is to meet through shared interests with individuals who, in one way or another, are moved by the same thing as you, and that process, that space. What we are looking for, in essence, is what is always achieved in areas where we can connect in a free -deliberate but freeway with actors with common interests is to start the seeds of development of trust, recognition, and confidence because the first thing is that recognition of Look! Wow! You are interested, interested in those same seeds of what moves me, and that gives you even credit for one that I feel identified and even embraced without being embraced and that in its essence evolves to the point that we can really reach certain degrees of trust in these spaces that break this fabric of insecurity, fear, even anxiety around relationships.?

Now from that evolution, usually and naturally, there is always technology. I believe that many spaces began to emerge, to participate in spaces through the interest that moved each one of us. I remember that I participated in forums. I had an interest in people who were in the same thing. We coincided, but I did not contribute much there. I was complementarily interested, and I recognized others interested with me in that space, and that emerges and evolves. When trust evolves, it may be that it is the second stage in those spaces or others.

Suddenly these interests can lead us to understand that we also have common objectives through these interests. Still, those objectives have to be catapulted by this recognition of interest that this collectivity can add. It may be that our purpose is not exactly the same. Still, we already have more explicit goals for the spaces. That starts to make the participation of one add to the objective of the other. There starts to be a kind of design of processes that allow us all to empower ourselves. I remember some spaces; I admire many people in the history of this because each thought makes me recognize people in each stage.

I remember when the technological communities were emerging, that is to say, people more specialized in certain technologies than others already had an obvious objective, which was to boost their career, to develop one or more products or some had an entrepreneurial spirit, to say I want to create a business and I participated in all three.

I remember that I was in 2010-2011 in conversations with people who have had a career with a tremendous evolution today. This technological act is impressive development today. But everything was born from a vestige of recognizing each other 10-15 years ago and at some point or another, always coinciding from how I add you to your goal and, interestingly, how you add to my goal.?So that can evolve to what he called "The peak of the collaborative process" which is not so easy to reach because it requires many coincidences in the process, which is where you start to see standard procedures, where not only the objectives collide and enhance each other, you actually reach this level of trust, recognition and experience in the collaborative process that we start to see joint projects, we start to see common causes that mobilize us to execute together in a deliberate way; And that is where I naturally believe that processes begin to form that begin to create spaces, solutions where there is an impulse with greater governance; because the challenge of moving from the objectives to the process of having projects, common causes that drive communities around a more specific theme, has to do with how this space of governance is created around how we can all participate with the most significant level of freedom but also maintaining the implicit codes of the culture of the community that surrounds us.

More than the definition -which I think is what I started with- I think the biggest challenge ends up being?how do we identify those spaces for building collaboration, execution, implementation from participation, recognition, and trust until that evolves towards common or not common objectives but with more clearly identified goals that enhance each other, from the actors of specific digital or physical spaces and how that could emerge towards joint projects in a particular case that already has a more deliberate, more intensive agenda that also attract in a more specific way these others. These stakeholders want to recognize more people around a particular topic, which allows a more complex and more profound development of a particular issue or problem?

N.?From what I hear, we go from recognizing each other, trusting each other, having clarity in our objectives, and that this leads us to have projects and common causes that allow us to develop processes; so let's say that this is a bit the virtuous path that you have shown of collaboration.?

And the question here would be: Where do technology projects come in? I know you have seen hundreds of technology projects. Some company processes with technology, other projects only with technology, but where does the variable come in? Here in this world of data,?which is where I believe there is a powerful expression of the potential of collaboration in this opportunity to connect our data, to provide our data, to believe in a platform, and above all, to believe in the links of that platform within a community, with whom it connects to that platform, with what other data it relates to and that is what makes a platform powerful?

From your perspective, this concept, this idea of this philosophy -I don't know what to call it- of collaboration. What can you see expressed in many things in our lives? Where do you see it expressed in technology today?

A.?The magic of collaboration is that it makes people feel close to other people. So collaboration ends up being a social act.?Now, how this is taking a form in which access is massified so that many more people participate in these spaces, which could historically narrate an evolution of technologies, that is, we began to participate in a forum space as the first thing that emerged on the Internet, before that we could even say write direct messages with people you did not even know; but let's say that the forums were one of those spaces where there began to be people who participated. So it is to expose you that I can no longer only afford a collaboration with those in the village, so to speak.

If we think about history, collaboration was always a space that allowed us to have access to what collectively we could have better access than individually, from the villages, from history we could see it, but they were not spaces that allowed too much access; you had to be in a physical, geographical area with certain conditions,?now technology begins to multiply, basically to break the barriers of entry and to multiply the possibilities.

I would say that data begins to be a problem that we find later, which is about how much we have learned from these spaces to the point that we can feed them back, nurture them in a more virtuous, more organized way so that whoever enters new to the collaborative community can have easier access and use of all the value contained in it.

The first problem is access. How do we get more people to participate in this good thing that allows us to grow together?

Then the forums began, then ICQ, MSN began, with the famous chats and open discussion spaces on different topics, which was like that manifestation of things in real-time, but what it continues to allow is more accessible as "I am interested, and I want to recognize more people on this topic" before it was more difficult to access those topics, where I had to write an email a little cold if it was from before, to see if they would pay attention to me, I had to break the barriers of participation to technology.

I would say that since 2000 there has been a space; from 1998 to 2006-2007, a massive space began to be born on how to give more access, that is, how we manage to amplify the spectrum of participation of anyone to the network - let's put it at a technological level - and it is where the chat explodes, forums explode and there begin to be super exciting things in Latin America. The access, you have it easy. I am driven to want to discover something, I no longer have to be ambiguous about how to navigate the universe to try it, but later I can achieve it more quickly.

And in fact, there began to have greater dominance how in this space, the famous search engines, of which Google ended up being the winner. But, still, well, there were starting to be many before Google.

What they say is that there is so much for those who have access - which at that time was a lot, but we cannot tell if it was more than what there is now - it was so much that is not easy to access, so they begin to try to organize those spaces, and that is where technology begins to play its second moment. It is not only access but also how you can make good use of the resources of this crowd, of this collectivity, so that you can generate your value towards the objective you have.

This begins to emerge towards other technologies. It can already be how to focus these elements around a particular problem. So why don't we call now? It is no longer just like, "Hey, everyone participates in a somewhat free way to see what you find, let's organize this a little bit," but now why not call those who are moved by a cause, an objective, or something to participate in something that is already organized around creating the best space to achieve those results, whether commercial, business or technological results?

Divine technologies that I am mentioning are beginning to emerge, of course, Reddit, Quora but others much more segmented like Waze, Mapillary, that at ground street level gives massive location data and other things are beginning to emerge like crowdsourcing, crowdlending which is crowdfunding.

We started to see problems and make calls around these problems to the communities. We began to play around these spaces, and here different magic starts to happen; in each area, each technological implementation around this path solves problems. It is. We started with this problem, and now how do we solve it??

And naturally, the manifestation of this begins to be the very traditional social networks such as Facebook or Twitter, which started to play with generating these interactions.

The challenge that begins to emerge from this -I would say- division of technologies around improving how we interact to focus on specific problems; there began to be challenging, which is this way of basically orchestrating the relationship of generating a safe open space but that allows us to have specific rules of participation. This governance around this, and there begin to be two main problems of governance: what we allow and what we do not allow and the use of data, which is, what do we get with all this? How do we use it in favor of the community effectively?

And all these problems begin, and we are possibly still evolving around them because some aspects have been successful at the governance level. We start to see that technology has already started to play a role. When we already have such a level of density of actors, it is no longer an issue of just having access because, in reality, access is generalized. There are certainly challenges to digitization, but there is a generalization of access.?

The challenge naturally begins to focus on how we organize, allow, and generate that these relationships are appropriately designed and accessible for their participation. It is where we start to understand that a platform is based on a central model that allows actors to interact in a governance space. We also know that these interactions are organized in such a way that they are effective for both parties and that they evolve in a safe way for all the participants of that community, and that is why data becomes a fundamental element, which is: What work do we solve or what work does each type of person expect to solve when participating in these networks?

The concept of platforms begins a whole element of analysis, which is how we build spaces that allow these interactions to be easy to happen, safe, and that would enable that in their evolution, there is no loss of value or this disconnection of the participants to continue wanting to be engaged in the middle of these spaces; this concept of the platform opens a parallel universe, which is already the subject of the platforms and how they emerge as businesses.?

N.?And it seems that those platforms that break away from this sooner rather than later are going to lose trust because now there is no longer an imposition. Users have to place their trust in the platform, which will indeed depend on fulfilling that promise of value, on respecting those values, and because the platform has that in its essence, that it is truly in favor of the community it represents and that is much easier said than done because we see emblematic cases like Facebook's, where little by little you see them distancing themselves from that initial value proposition and users are becoming more and more perceptive of this.

And one of the last questions I had is, what examples have you seen that have motivated you, that is? What are some examples of success stories that you have seen in your career, the development of technological products and companies, and how in the world (as we say)? What do those inspiring examples of this have in the future? This can generate a positive disruptive change, or is it causing a positive disruptive change in humanity?

A.?I would say that the beauty of this evolution is not to create a historical document - history is divine, I love history - but if we analyze the evolution of this, the forums were surprising at the time, and they were triggers for participation. Then there starts to be this tremendous admiration for these spaces that, in one way or another, are achieving more deliberate objectives such as the spaces. I don't know; Khan Academy seems to be a space that was detonating and pivotal in how education or at least access to knowledge starts to be a massive and collective act.

After that, I started to move a lot around this massiveness of creating centers of interest around Reddit; for example, I found spectacular the way this happens. At the same time that this, I began to admire the theme of open technologies, open-source where, after all, the galleries are part of a technologist, developer, and other things; that is, I lived in a world of libraries, then the space of libraries where you could find codes of others and start to achieve amazing things.

In this interim, networks such as social media, and Facebook, were naturally detonating and fundamental in history. However, today we may be somewhat cold - it is a saying - with some allergies around critical growth processes. I connect that a lot with the massiveness of participation makes us begin to have more heterogeneous processes that permeate to understand that not everyone was behind the same thing or the same interest in the same way. Instead, this break allows this diversity to be created.?

I think we are basically in a moment of diversity in which possibly several platforms will emerge, thematically segmented by the community, which begin to have a prominence that they could not achieve in the last ten years mainly because of lack of density and because we were not at that point. First, we populated, so to speak, a planet, but we did not build villages. So it is a bit how this emerges.

Lately, I have been fascinated by Blockchain. I think any technologist today could say, Wow! Blockchain's potential as a technology to bring trust to linking platforms, people through technology or processes that get transparency with a little bit of credibility and history; traceability is fantastic.

Similarly, the business models that we can say are created around this, that crypto. I participate, in Crypto Loans, Borrow y Staking- whatever it is - I try to have some space to be understanding how the way we use these technologies is evolving.

Blockchain will naturally be pivotal in the history of the data transfer process, on the issue of relationships between actors in an ecosystem, and on the issue of returning to the essence of traceability, security, and trust that catapults a new moment of collective participation. So besides the fact that now we have problems -we have always had problems- but now that we are more aware, more visible towards global issues of very high relevance that require complex processes to solve them because they are complex systems with multiple edges of complexity. I am not referring to difficulty, but to the complexity that emerges, that problems have a hundred different ways of looking at the same problem, trade machine, things like that.

N. Social systems have always been complex, but new technology offers many possibilities to put some kind of order and structure, transparency, as you were saying, to those problems. Still, it has also added another layer of complexity. It can show the multiple edges of a single thing to make that complexity visible, those various layers.

And finally, what is the future you dream of? If you had to say, what trends make you optimistic about the future you dream of??

A.?Look that the collectivity that we achieve through this level of density in the participation of people at a digital level allows knowledge to be massive. I?believe that the education level plus the pandemic removes some of those barriers, such as those paradigmatic jealousies. Those paradigms that hindered how the flow basically around this can potentially solve the problems of access to knowledge; not for everyone, not in all ways, but rather in very diverse ways. In education, we will undoubtedly see a new emergence basically of educated people with the capacity to have access and change their reality a little bit from this level of population and to have access to knowledge in a much more effective way.?

The other thing is that I think it is always very tied to density, how we are already so many from such diverse perspectives, that we are participating and having access to the same thing, we can naturally be super moved to recognize problems such as climate change, or fundamental issues of nature and survival and how we can participate effectively to mobilize causes that improve, that generate progress in solving these problems, it is fascinating how technology is going to allow us to do so.

The third and, I think, where the challenges reconcile, ends up being governance again, how we manage to organize ourselves around that massiveness to achieve not only the interest and recognition but also to play from the objectives and execute massive joint projects.

It seems that the Blockchain will bring a lot of that piece of transparency and credibility. We are not at the tip of the iceberg, but it is possible to use technology around different problems. I'm going towards the financial activities, which naturally is one of the massive problems people recognize. Still, I think of other issues like data, communication, Information, Access to Information, personal data security, and all this flow, and I'm very excited about that.

And what I think is a challenge at the social structure level is that we have the challenge of questioning the history in those segments, for example, in the social and political sector. How can we absorb, embrace some of these vast advances around participation, security that may have existed in technology to challenge us to understand to see models that allow us this can emerge with a new breath of security, transparency, of participation; I think the TechForGood theme, is something determinant towards that.

N.?It seems that perhaps we can nurture the real world, the physical world, from technology. Despite so many laws and many natural systems, there is no clarity about the game's rules. There are many fronts. There is an excellent opportunity from technology to try to contribute with Blockchain, for example, to the need for clear rules of transparency and traceability; I agree that this is a hopeful future, but above all, it is a future that invites us to continue working for that.?

A. Of course,?we not only need technology, but we also need good thinking; that is to say, good brains that are trying to decipher how to challenge us to understand, how to put technology in favor of specific problems that suddenly start to escalate in an exciting way to have greater participation and growth. The routes of growth at the collaborative level are always uncontrollable, except that you can reach an infinite level. Still, we need to think correctly in questioning paradigms that sometimes are pretty established. Deep and informed reflections are required, where we need people like you, really taking the time to discern issues and propose solutions through technology and participation.?

N. And like you, that is why we are here collaborating.

Well, Andrés, thank you very much for this time. One continuously learns a lot talking to you, not only for the depth of your thinking but also for your tremendous capacity to structure complex ideas in schemes that are easy to understand. I can almost make an infographic of your conversation with great depth and an immense practical expression that is part of your magic.

Thank you very much, and a big hug! I hope to have you here as a guest again soon!

A. Nelly, what a pleasure, many successes, and to all of you, I think let's push every story that comes out in the TechForGood Series, which is the best way to continue collaborating with those who are creating, generating this reflection, and putting it into action for their business models or projects, so happy and admired by all who have passed through here.

Big hug, and whenever I can, I'm at your service.

N. Thank you.