At the heart of our association, a group of volunteer contributors “Positivists” -as we call ourselves-. We are happy to keep welcoming new members recently, many new faces in 2022 already! You can join them too, see how here.

• Jessica Salama working with Gooddollar. From Bolivia and based in Tel-Aviv!
• Jessica Nono working in tech & embedded systems, and also developping her own NFT x Music project. From Cameroon and based in Berlin.
• Gy Lacrois working with Ethichub. From France and based in Madrid
• Razali Samsudin behind many Sustainable Development Goals initiatives within the Cardano ecosystem like Sustainable ADA. From London and based in Paris.
• Stacey Tsui who worked in journalism & video production in Hong Kong in the past few years.
• Cole Bartlett also very active with Razali in the Cardano eco-system, and SustainableADA. Based in the US

We are also happy to announce the new board 2022 of Positiveblockchain, with Carmen Ng, Analia Ramos, Lucas Zaehringer, Maciej Bulanda, Flavio Santalucia.

In recent weeks and now months, we have had to observe the dramatic developments in Afghanistan. You are in close contact with your family and friends there. What is the local situation like?

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to express my thoughts regarding the situation in Afghanistan. Of course it is baffling to see how quickly everything escalated and how overnight the fate of an entire country went upside down. I have been in constant contact with my family, friends and colleagues on the ground and trying to be as helpful as I can from here. Despite the whole chaos, distress and uncertainty at least there seems to be a significant decrease in violence which is a silver lining of sorts, but people are hope and perspective less and are living in a dire situation where they don’t know what tomorrow will bring. I know that with such an immense transformation we need to be patient to see and experience what will come, but for the common person who lives from daily wages or paycheck to paycheck it is a matter of survival and it is devastating to see.

Can you briefly describe the most important projects you have launched in Afghanistan in the last years? What is the current status of these projects?

We founded Startupistan as a grassroot entrepreneurship community in Kabul in 2018 and the goal has been to encourage entrepreneurship and adapt technology for good. We started as a small online community to test and find the first few like minded people so that we can have ambassadors on the ground which slowly slowly become more formal and in the last couple of years we have developed a local Digital Skills school, a coworking space and a small Incubator for Startups. We have hosted a range of conferences and hackathons on a range of relevant topics to create awareness and prototype solutions for local problems.

Currently our whole team is still on the ground, but our campus remains closed. We are observing the developments and will act accordingly, but to put things into perspective we remain committed to Afghanistan and will continue to operate. We are currently adapting our offerings and are looking for ways to offer our service to both women and men equally.

Are there possibilities to help from abroad in the very confusing and dynamic situation? What can be done to help and support the people in Afghanistan?

I believe the first thing that is currently missing in Afghanistan is ‘Hope’. The very first thing we can do is to morally support the millions of Afghans who are totally hopeless and are currently leading an uncertain life. More concretely, ways of help can be asking governments to help evacuate people whose lives are in danger, but also not to forget the millions of people who will still remain in Afghanistan, this can be the biggest humanitarian crisis, so we have to act now and deploy support. Of course donation to initiatives that are on the ground can be a good immediate help. 

Do you see a role for blockchain technology in defusing the crisis in Afghanistan? Can we network and support a tech community to develop and disseminate such tools?

I believe in a situation like this blockchain can play a very vital role, decentralized and Autonomous Organizations and peer to peer solutions are key for having a thriving community in uncertain times like these. Unfortunately we also have to take into account the local context of Afghanistan, we lack infrastructure and expertise on the ground, so there is a big need for support and network, the global community needs to come together and help prototype solutions, we are currently looking into a peer to peer payment solution and will be happy to have exchange of ideas on this. 

Thank you so much for your time! How can we best follow your work?

Thanks again for giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts. You can learn more about Startupistan here startupistan.org and if you looks to have a chat you can reach our via LinkedIn.

Our crowdfunding campaign is still on: Startupistan.org/100 also if you would like to make a donation if crypto please reach out at mozamel (at) startupistan and we will send you the instructions. Please note that we have a registered non-profit in Germany and we can issue donation receipts for tax benefits.

Today, we talk to Karim Chabrak of Coinsence about his work in community building and decentralized value creation!

Karim is founder of coinsence.org, a decentral collaboration, value creation and exchange platform that enables communities to create their own impact currencies to fund SDG related projects and mobilize resources. Coinsence project is one of 6 global cohort projects which received funding from UNICEF Innovation fund and one of the first projects receiving ETH from UNICEF crypto fund that is supported by the Ethereum foundation.

Karim has an engineering and research background in telecommunication, is senior expert for network strategy and innovation and is delegate of Deutsche Telekom in 3GPP telecommunication standardization organization. Besides tokenized economy and fair finance, Karim’s main interest area is how to use technologies to create new economic and governance models which are better capable to tackle today’s social and environmental challenges.

Let’s start at the beginning – every changemaker needs to start somewhere. Do you have a specific story about what brought you on this path?

Already as a child, my mother started explaining me how the financial system works, and I started questioning the bugs and the long-term consequences. But I trusted at that time that the rules of the system are based on scientific facts and must make sense, and that governments will care about social and environmental aspects when problems become serious.

After the financial crisis in 2008, I started thinking about alternatives. For me, I could not find any logic justification why people still rely on a monetary system which is not transparent, which they do not control, and which is not mainly designed to consider local needs, personal interests (demands of individuals over those of corporates and institutions) and the long-term global challenges.

The Arabic revolution 2011 was the initiator for me to start thinking about alternative financial and governance systems. I could not understand that in the digital age educated youth keep wait over years to get jobs and to serve others interests instead of starting jointly creating value for themselves. I could not understand in a connected world that free humans still need to protest and fight against old structures while they are able to build complete new – even global – financial, governance and economic systems using the internet. I started looking for more peaceful and effective ways to empower people and enable political power shifts and economical transitions. Decentral organization tools, a better coupling between financial instruments and the collective intelligence of the people, and full transparency of monetary flows and value transactions seemed to be the right direction to think.

Luckily, I was not the only one believing that people can and have to create their own currencies (financial?) and governance systems, to enable change and to solve their own problems. Blockchain technology was around the corner and the tech ecosystem started innovating in all possible direction I could think about.

My firm believe in the potential of alternative currencies and economy came at a time I was analyzing corporate cultures and business operation models. looking for better solutions for effective innovation management, flexible and efficient cross-silo resource sharing and agile collaboration. At that time, it became obvious very fast that decentral governed open value creation ecosystem powered by different tokenized assets have the economic and social potential to bring about a real change.

You have an incredible wealth of experience to draw from. What were your favorite projects or initiatives to work on?

The favorite projects or initiatives to work on for me are generally those which create a positive impact on society and environment. Especially when working on big challenges with professional and inspiring people who really care, when working in a diverse and dynamic environment with reasonable autonomy, work gives life a sense and becomes a tremendous source of self-fulfillment and happiness.

My favorite project to work on is still Coinsence, where we face constantly new challenges. It gives me the opportunity to meet daily great people, discover new solutions and learn new things. Especially our work with UNICEF in Tunisia gives me a unique opportunity to meet great people in the civil society and from different institution, who really care about future generations and who are fully devoted to their mission.

We are currently focusing on setting up DAO’s (decentralized autonomous organization) to use the received ETH Crypto fund and mobilize the tech community to work on innovative solutions which contribute to positive impact on sustainable development goals SDG’s. Enabling people to propose ideas and decide about fund distribution requires careful design of the framework and a lot of advocacy and community building work to shift mindsets and ensure reaching positive results.

What are the most exciting things you are currently working on? 

Currently, I am working on adapting the Coinsence concept and solution to faster scale the community and increase the synergies and impact of the ecosystem. Besides community building and partner acquisition, I am working on the re-design of our technical solution, to meet at the same time the flexibility and security requirements we expect from a blockchain based solution and to offer on the other side our members simpler interfaces and a seamless user experience.

The most exciting thing is still the exchange with the great innovators and change makers within our network and the valuable and passionate discussions with people on our solution and its applications.

Based on your experience, what do you think are the 5 biggest roadblocks on the way to a more sustainable future?

I see that short terms thinking of decision makers, biased by personal, organizational and national interests, is the main roadblocks on the way to a more sustainable future. We have on one side national politics driven too often by people who do not understand global finance and economy and who are far from innovation and technology. Companies on the other side are still essentially measured by profit generation and shareholder value. Both act in a global ecosystem with multi-national corporates and a financial system with a high level of speculation.

The missing common vision, the lack of global democratic decision-making frameworks, and the lack of global monitoring and steering instruments force limit policy makers in creating global solutions, containing the exploitation of the environment, and create stable social systems with fair working conditions.

We have today many grassroots initiatives, social startups and growing movements in the society and within organization which are more and more aware of the problems and which are able to offer better solutions. The challenge is still how to mobilize resources, create synergies and manage transformation in a situation were still big decisions are made top-down in silos by people in the comfort zone who tend to do business as usual.

The power asymmetry between those who care about sustainability and society and those who benefit from fossil oil and financial speculation poses a big challenge for social entrepreneurs, innovators and change makers. Besides the big financial power to gamble and the excessive forces to control resource, the old establishments still have strong instruments to influence consumer behavior and public opinion. For me, it is always a challenge to find visionary leaders who invest the time to think out of the box beyond the current status quo, who understand alternative transformation strategies and who consider trying other ways and dare taking actions.

And it needs politicians who question the existing economic models which are measured based on growth of financial transactions (GDP). Wouldn’t it be great to hear a politician saying “we have to use technology to reduce workload and remove jobs to ensure that people get more time for social outreach and society as a social mesh can flourish.“. I believe this should be the right direction and that we can design the right cooperation models that support a sustainable growth of well-being. But it is not easy to talk with people about post growth economy, about reduction of production and consumption, or about cooperation efficiency and commons when their biggest fear is to lose their jobs and their homes.

Most today’s funding instruments are designed for extractive business models and for private equity creation. It is almost impossible for entrepreneurs to get funding for building transparent, sustainable and efficient prosumer ecosystems which are based on open value creation, decentral organization and distributed ownership.

Which role does technology, especially blockchain, play in this future? What role does it play along the way?

Distributed ledger technology combined with further sophisticated analytics and prediction algorithms could completely change global economy and the governance structures. Blockchain will enable people and communities to build completely new decision-making, resource management, value creation and exchange ecosystems. Blockchain offers new mechanisms to couple financial performance with the democratic will of people and with the social and environmental impact.

Sovereign and reliable digital identities will be the basis for a real change, on which any social, organizational or economic structure can be built. Connected devices and internet of things could deliver the needed data to build decentral value creation chain and ecosystems that can leverage common production tools and further create shared assets and resources.

Transaction fees and demurrage, flexible impact-based taxations can be implemented globally and bound to currency specific policies and governance frameworks.

Blockchain started already challenging different financial, economic and organizations models and enabling new form of cooperation between communities. The benefits of Blockchain related to giving people more control and enabling them to create value at lower cost is motivating more and more groups to experiment, iterate and scale. It’s just a matter of a few year, and we will start seeing a shift in society. Especially the mindset of the youth will change the more they become aware about their own potential and the powerful tools they have in their hands.

Considering current global Covid-19 challenge, do you see the potential added value of Blockchain?

Blockchain can be very helpful when suddenly, different stakeholders and individuals need to work together, must commit to certain deliverables and have to build trust without having an established organizational or legal framework. Smart contracts can help introducing reliable and flexible decentral processes to easily engage diverse organizations and individuals. Based on different social and business agreement, communities and organizations can create for example short-term liquidity to mobilize resources and fund projects addressing common challenges like Corona. We are currently introducing with partners in Tunisia an impact currency to fund innovative projects and community initiatives coming from different hackathons and associations. Here, companies can instead of donating money, also deliver resources now to projects or can offer in the future discounts to their customers who contributed to projects. The coins are used here to make projects, resources and transactions transparent and accountable. The engagement of each member in the network becomes visible and rewardable.

What is your advice for others that want to facilitate change in their community, industry, or in their life in general?

My clear advice for community and industry leaders is to learn more about technology and about alternative financial and economic models, to consider experimenting, introducing and using impact-oriented community currencies and become advocates for better solutions and a real change.

How can we best follow your work?

www.coinsence.org

https://www.facebook.com/coinsencetunisia/

de.linkedin.com › company › coinsencetn

All members, projects, activities and transactions are visible on our platform which can be joined under community.coinsence.org

Karim, thank you very much for this insightful and inspiring interview, and for your great work in the field!

Let’s start with Iulian Circo, the co-founder of Proof of Impact.

Iulian Circo is a recovering humanitarian turned entrepreneur. Over the last two decades he has been part of action-packed operations in some of the world’s most challenging environments that included humanitarian missions in post-conflict and peace-keeping settings such as Somalia or DR Congo. He has also run country operations for large global non-profits in places such as Swaziland or Mozambique. Over the last decade, he has founded and took to scale a number of impact-driven enterprises, including his current project, Proof of Impact – a venture-backed global marketplace for impact capital. Iulian is also involved with a number of other exciting ventures, either as co-founder, adviser, investor or board member.

Thank you so much for having this interview with us! To start off, a lot of your work is revolving around impact. How did you get to work on this topic? 

I have spent my whole life on the front-lines of impact delivery. From operationally-intense, hands-on work in post conflict settings all the way up to developing national and regional strategies for health service deliveries. Working on the frontlines of impact delivery I have learned to appreciate the role of technology as a force multiplier and the huge impact that entrepreneurship and innovation have on people and communities. I have also understood the inadequacy of incumbent business models (be these for profit or charity) in these settings and the huge opportunity that can be addressed with innovative business models that combine impact and profit. This is how I became a social entrepreneur and an impact start-up person.

Can you tell us a bit more about the things you are currently working on in this context? 

Well the most exciting venture I am involved in is Proof of Impact. Proof of Impact came to be out of the combination of my impact background and my co-founder’s insights from a life spent in capital markets and impact investing. We met in 2017 in Cape Town and both of us got excited by the idea of making impact tradeable. Of unlocking a trillion USD value of that we ended up calling the “Purpose Economy”. We see purpose as a transformational element that is defining the identity of a whole new generation. Young people are aware of the importance of social and environmental impact and see them as existential topics. They define their identity through purpose and authenticity, and this will change global economic frameworks fundamentally. 

We were initially self-funded and eventually we received some angel investment that helped us build a basic prototype and sign up a very exciting partnership with Cordaid and the Netherlands Government. Eventually we signed up more than 30 different partnerships with impact creators and our partnership pipeline is looking pretty good. We are now at an exciting point in our evolution as we have just closed our current round of funding – the first institutional funding round – and have received investments from a good mix of venture capital and more established asset managers across Silicon Valley and Crypto Valley. We are now looking at going to market properly and growing fast.  

What are the 5 biggest opportunities you see in impact measurement and investment? 

I have a contrarian opinion on impact measurement. I think the impact’s industry obsession with impact measurement as a stand-alone goal/ end in itself is problematic. The fact that there is a whole impact measurement industry that depends on impact measurement as a service is another problem. Impact should be obvious and at the heart of every decision taken. In that sense, I am looking forward to a situation where impact measurement is commoditized and standardized so that impact calculations are inherent in every business decision. You don’t have a “profit measurement” industry. Everyone in a company understands their profitability and the relationship of individual decisions to the profitability of the company. This is exactly how impact should work. 

In that sense, there is one big opportunity around building a utility infrastructure for measuring impact (positive and negative/ externalities). If indeed the wider economic framework is shifting towards a purpose-driven market, then every economic player – from small businesses to multinationals – will need to “prove” their impact to consumers and regulators. But if impact measurement remains as complex as it is now, most companies will not be able to verticalize impact measurements within their core business and would prefer to access (and pay for!) a utility service that would evaluate and calculate their actual impact. Plug an play.   

The other huge opportunity is that of building viable financial products for a new generation of investors. Investment products that are underwritten by impact. Not by impact narratives or theoretical models. But by real, verified events. This has been an elusive quest for decades (even both of founders of POI had various attempts at defining such models in the past). The emergence of blockchain technology provides a technical solution to some of the structural problems that come with this model. I think we can now use impact verification as a proof of work for a new type of financial asset and I am really enjoying the journey of POI leading on the market with this thinking. 

To complete the list of 5, in short order, a few other opportunities:

• Event-triggered models: where an event triggers a contract such as a payment. We’ll see applications in things like insurance and so on, but also in the context of the Internet of things and machines executing contracts with machines (think about cars paying for pollution or the use of certain streets etc). Another huge area of application is a new generation of performance based payments to fund impact on open marketplaces.  
• Eco-system payments. If things like the rain forest or the ocean have intrinsic value, then we could imagine whole monetary systems pegged to the state of the forest o the ocean and independent of any transient government. There are some very intelligent people thinking in this direction.
• Nano-payments applied to data. The BAT system and the Brave Browser are examples of this model applied to privacy. I believe there will be plenty other similar models in which people get instant nano-payments for specific data points. Huge applicability in health, too.

 What are the 5 biggest challenges? 

As always with innovation, the biggest challenge is inertia – people’s unwillingness to change something that they do not perceive as “broken”. This is particularly the case with incumbents, who have a lot to lose from the emergence of new models. However, once insurgent companies start rolling out these new models, the incumbents will struggle to keep up and many of them will not make it into the new framework. A few other challenges:

• Unreliable data around impact & a normalized cavalier attitude towards vague impact models;
• Fragmented impact frameworks, that make it very difficult to see the whole picture. This means that a company can have devastating negative externalities on the one side and some positive impact on the other without the two to be clearly reconciled;
• The fact that we tend to think about impact in isolation from everything else. The biggest shift in the larger economic framework will happen when the idea of “impact profitability” gets normalized – and it will happen under the pressure from the new generations of consumers.

Now, from a project perspective: How can projects effectively get started with a meaningful impact strategy? 

All projects should articulate a thesis of sorts about their impact on the world. And then work their way back from there. Also, it is a mistake to look at impact and understanding one’s impact as a hassle and a net cost. In the new competitive landscape impact – a proven impact, rather than an impact narrative – is a huge differentiator. Eventually it will become a passport factor where companies that do not prove their impact to the world will simply not be accepted by consumers, investors and regulators. 

What are your biggest lessons related to effective impact measurement? 

You got to keep things simple. Don’t try to track 70 different indicators. Have a clearly articulated thesis and track whatever correlates to that thesis. Also, know the difference between inputs and outputs –  try to only track outputs rather than inputs. 

Do you think social/ environmental impact and profit are mutually exclusive? Can they work together, and how? 

They are absolutely not mutually exclusive. In fact my core thesis as an entrepreneur is the exact opposite. I believe we are contemporary with a massive shift in the economic framework, led by a new generation of consumers that identify themselves with purpose and positive impact. These consumers will make profit at the cost of the environment socially unacceptable.  I believe that in this new economy, purpose is a minimum standard and companies that fail to prove a net positive impact will become obsolete as discerning, impact-minded consumers will simply refuse to engage with them. I believe that “purpose” for the new cohorts of consumers will be exactly what “social” was for millennials – everything will evolve around it. And we will see first-principles purpose companies that will shoot past mumbling incumbents who will struggle – and mostly fail – to keep up.

How can we best follow your work? 

Here are my personal twitter handle and Linkedin profile. I also write at Medium, occasionally.

Here is my company’s webpage. We are also active on instagram and on twitter.

Iulian, many thanks for your insights and inspirations, and for the great work you are doing!