Last Thursday 1st March 2018, we had the opportunity of mentoring a group of IE Business school students during the TECH4CHANGE event organized by IE Business School, IE Net Impact Club, Makesense.org and Impact Revolution. Álex Casas, one of our team members was there as Shelpin founder, but he had his big Blockchain 4 Humanity hat on.
There were 3 experts and Álex (definitely not an expert but with the passion of a ton of them) helping the student groups to came up with ideas based in the proposed technologies to solve social challenges of our time.
We had the pleasure of knowing a group of incredibly brilliant people and what is most important, with insignificant brains compared to their souls and hearts, Francisco on drones, Pedro, on big data, and Raul on AI (well, we will meet in a soon to be held lunch to continue an incredible conversation as he had a little accident that made impossible that he could attend, we hope you are totally recovered now, Raul) also Conchita leading the panel , and Clara, Jeri, Gilles, Elisa and members of the Net Impact, Makesense and Impact Revolution, who made a perfect work organizing the event and all the incredibly inspiring IE students that attended.
We had to solve a concrete challenge after a brief presentation of the technologies and a panel on opportunities and threats for social impact around big data, artificial intelligence, drones/robotics.
Well, typical event till here, what happened after was truly magic, every group had to move to a separate room to work in a believe me, really really short time to work on their solutions to be pitched on.
Teams had to convince a fictitious board represented by attendees votes to invest 1.000.000 $ in a concrete solution pitched to the audience in two minutes.
We had the challenge to help refugees with blockchain technologies, starting by the identity, the brainstorming there was quite active and with very interesting points of view in all the members of the team (BIG CONGRATS AGAIN!!!), we talked i.e. about competences being part of your identity to rebuild your life in any destiny country , we tried to imagine and understand the problems around identity in that trip, and we had two clear conclusions, we had no remote idea from our comfortable place in society about how horrible and unhuman must be start that hardest trip ever, and that even besides identity, the only point is to survive and rebuild your life with as many members of your beloved ones near you as possible, so we started playing around the idea of p2p airdropped donations and ended in creating value sharing connections with the “civilized” world in which donations could be lendings with return for others (chain of favours) and/or investing with the social return of a child getting a prominent engineer in a future in his destiny country, definitely we started a very interesting discussion about the concepts of donation, lending and investment under the prism of the social return in the context of refugees p2p aid in the long term.
The blockchain tech team won (CONGRATS TEAM!!) , not because our idea was great but for the energy, passion and enormous enthusiasm poured by Jordan in every single second of his intervention in the pitch, he was a piece of an incredible team that got together there that evening and ended winning the TECH4CHANGE event and starting a path that I would encourage the team to explore.
Some magic happened there and that is the kind of magic that we want to support in Blockchain 4 Humanity.
We definitely would love to follow the directions we started and see where do they lead… so if the team is committed to explore the path opened last Thursday, we would love to be a supportive arm… have a look to our just released website. www.b4h.world and let us make the world a better place one block at a time.
Originally published at https://medium.com on March 5, 2018.
