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Introducing the Oview Team: Francesco Baraldi

Hello everybody,

I am Francesco, an intern at Oview. I have been working here for four months, and I really enjoyed the experience. As a student of political science I started as a content developer for the app, and then I shifted to the marketing and social media department, where I have been creating content for our social media platforms. This was necessary because we started to work on our crowdfunding campaign, and all hands were needed to contribute to this huge effort.

The new role provided me with a deep knowledge of Twitter, a platform I had never used before. Now I know properly how to use it, they even call me “A Twitter Pro” sometimes at Oview. Anyway, this is not the only reason why I enjoy working here: start-ups have a very dynamic environment, therefore you learn by doing, taking decisions, and sometimes also by making mistakes. I think that an environment like this helps you grow: being able to take decisions and have the appropriate support for it, is something that can really make you more confident of your skills.

Last but not least, Oview’s environment also deserves a mention: a very friendly work space where everybody is willing to help you in every occasion, the perfect environment in which students, as I am, can learn and improve their skills. Furthermore, the environment deserves another annotation; It is a democratically run social business, and it seems like the right way to live and thrive within an organisation.

In conclusion, what I can say is that Oview is a very unique team, keen to empower people using technology.

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We Shouldn’t Seperate Philosophy and Practice

For optimizing efficiency, outcomes, and benefits, we should give philosophy a central place in any kind of organization or proces. Someone who keeps asking, without any judgement: what the heck are we actually doing, and why? In the following series of articles I will explain why, what, and how together we can get to a better understanding and a better integration of theory and practice, so that we can reach maximum efficiency of anything we’re doing, whilst keeping our values intact.

There’s two competing camps: the Philosophy Department vs Down-To-Earth Practitioners

Philosophy has never been widely respected as a method of analyses and improvement. That’s because philosophers have often excluded themselves from practical reality as an elitist culture. It’s time for philosophy to live up to her own standards and starts contributing to practical society.

What we have at the moment are two separate ways of teaching philosophy. They don’t coincide, don’t have much to do which each other, and above all keeps philosophy out of any relevant practice.

On the one hand we have the philosophic academy, that we’ve discussed above, mostly investigating and discussing the mind and its theoretical possibilities, but not really considering any practical notions. On the other hand there’s the studies that we could call practical (disregarding the possible theoretical setup of these studies), like organizational studies, law, and communication.

You can’t make someone understand the fundamentals of anything in a brief series of lectures

Within each of these practical studies there’s a tiny part reserved for “Philosophy”. Most of the time it’s a once-in-a-lifetime course about the questions of fundamental theories underlying the concerning subject matter. People hardly ever get the relevance of this course. People complain about it, that it’s horrible, that they don’t understand a thing, and try to forget about it as soon as they’ve passed their exam.

It’s like asking the ice cream guy why his ice cream tastes like ice cream…

The aversion to philosophy is a very logical reaction, precisely because the philosophy course is a stand-alone course which students follow for a couple of weeks. During these weeks, students are plunged into a world of existential limits and the fundamental and complex ideas underlying their field of work. This is not something you can just do to people. You cannot just suddenly start about the philosophical aspects of anything without proper preparation and guidance. You cannot teach somebody a framework of ideas in a couple of weeks. Dozens of philosophers have devoted their lives to coming up with ideas and frameworks about how things should work, and we expect to summarize all that in a comprehensive 3-month course? You confront people with the sense of it all, with the question “why does something exist in the first place and why does it work the way it does?”. I don’t think you can ask someone this during work hours, so to speak.

Philosophy and practice don’t understand each other

There seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding on both sides. Society doesn’t know what philosophy has to offer, and philosophers are not really wanted because ‘all they do is dreaming and talking about incomprehensible fugazi’. Indeed, fugazi doesn’t exist. Forgive me for being biased (as I have a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy), but I blame the philosophers more than I blame society. I blame philosophers for not making a combined effort to show society what she can do and how she can help to fix fundamental problems in society. I don’t blame society, then, for not understanding that there is a practical, very realistic side to philosophy.

To be continued…

Next time I will consider the institutional role in the misunderstanding between philosophers and practical society. We will see how the university academies keep the elite position of philosophy intact and leaves no room for new ideas or practical improvement.

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The Secret Life of a Money Maker

Some people choose money as a career

It’s becoming trendy to make money, to be a stock broker or work for a bank. It’s a generation thing. While some of us go plant flowers and do yoga, others play with money on stock markets. It’s mostly men who seem to be attracted by themselves in a suit. Some people drink Yogi Tea, others sniff cocaine. It’s a matter of lifestyle.

And they just disappear…

The difference is that betting on stock markets makes much, much more money. People who make a lot of money seem to disappear into a secret system. They become invisible. They drive in medium-sized, slick, silent cars. They wear a suit. They live in expensive places where nobody goes. They get to their offices early in the morning so that nobody sees them coming. Some live alone. Others are married and have kids. During a break they will drop of their kids at daycare. You might even be sitting across them at the table, smiling and chatting about daily life, and you suddenly realize you’re talking about stock markets.

But you don’t even really notice. You don’t notice because there is nothing to notice. They have combed hair, wear brown pointy shoes and sometimes wear glasses. They have neatly shaved, shiny faces, as the sun reflects on their pale skin and light shirts. You don’t really see them. Your mind won’t register them. You can’t make a memory file of them because they blends in with the background. In fact, they cannot be seen. They are blind to the naked eye. Blue trousers accentuate their orangely tanned skin. They blend in with the grey streets they walk on and the concrete compartment blocks they live in. They’re part of a general color that you sometimes see flashing past a lawn or a tree. Their cars are medium-sized and expensive. BMW, Mercedes, Lexus, Rolls Royce. They drive so smooth that you don’t hear them passing by. And if you could see them, you wouldn’t hear them. They’re barely even with us.

And this is where the money in the world goes. Into a system of boys playing with money and keeping a lot of it for themselves. It’s going into a system that exists to support itself. A system that you cannot get to know unless you become part of it. A system full of jobs that shouldn’t have to exist. A system in which money circulates, but only seems to circulate in order to finance itself. Money disappears into it, but never comes out. What’s happening to our money?!

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How Democratic is our Democracy Really?

What is democracy?

Democracy is a system of government in which every member of an organization or society gets to be part of decision making. Demos is Greek for people and Kratos means power, so it literally means ‘power of the people.’ The books tell us that the Ancient Greeks ‘invented’ Democracy, but they’re actually just officially recorded to be the first who implemented this system as a form of political government. The books tell us that in Athens, the capital of Greece, the laws and rules of society were agreed upon by the people. But in reality you had to be an adult man who owns a land in order to have the right to partake in the decision making. Furthermore you had to be a resident, which means that you were either from Athens or you were rich enough to buy residency. So basically only wealthy people got to be part of the decision making. They were about 40.000 out of nearly 300.000 inhabitants. So…what makes this a democracy?

In more general terms an actual democracy is that every member of any community gets to decide what happens to this community, whether it’s an organization or a society. Every member plays a part in deciding about the decision that are being taken. There are also forms of democracy where people choose representatives, who will be in the government of an organization or a country on behalf of a certain amount of people. These people are the ones who elected this person. This is called a representative democracy. Many countries use this form of government.

How democratic is a democracy for real?

We’re used to thinking that our society is being governed democratically. That we are the ones who elect people to be in the parliament. Yes, it is true that we choose people to rule for us, but we don’t get to choose whom we really would want to rule. There is a select group of people we can choose from and we don’t even get to decide who is in this group. We merely get to choose which person fits our needs, our voices, the best. But what if there’s nobody that you really feel confident about, nobody who could really represent your opinion? Nobody of whom you think: “Yes, I want her/him to make decisions for my country!” ?

Because that’s what it should be. We should be able to choose anyone who wants to run for member of parliament. Perhaps people who never thought they could make decisions for a country could get pointed out that they have great ideas and that they should try and be in the government. Maybe you have always thought that your neighbour has such great ideas about how the country should be. What if he could mean something for your country? Wouldn’t that be great? That anyone you think has amazing ideas could rule your country? It could be your friend, your colleague, your professor, even your gym teacher. That way the country gets to be governed by people that are actually chosen by everyone.

But the people you vote for are already in a political party. And that party has more or less fixed ideas about certain topics. And in order to be electable you need to have a certain position in this party. In order to get to this position you have to have status, undergo unofficial rituals, know the right people. This hardly even indirect democracy. It’s not a democracy at all. Democracy is power of the people, of all people, not of a selected group of people who have the luck, people skills, popularity, money, or connections to become electable.

At Oview we take decisions democratically

At Oview, we believe in an equal part for everyone in deciding what happens to the company. We take decisions democratically. And the people who do the actual work get to make decisions. We don’t have a manager, and everything we do, we decide as a team. We believe that the people who run the company are the people who do the work. We don’t have a boss. We all have an equal position, which gives all of us an equal right to have a say in taking any decision. Because we believe that any community, small or large, should reflect the opinions, thoughts and feelings of everyone that belongs to it, not just of a small group of people.

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Introducing the team; Oview: Ugur Cetinkaya

My experience counts

Hello,

I’m a Padawan at Oview and in this text I will write about my experience in Oview. Oview is a company that’s based in Amsterdam which is trying to create a better society. It helps making the world a better place though on the one hand a revolutionary mobile application and on the other hand a friendly approach towards World’s community. At least that is what I have understood during my internship. I am 100% sure that you have never met people like those who works at Oview. Another thing you won’t believe is that this company doesn’t have a boss.

Let me tell you my story. I will tell you the story throughout three sections, which are, as you can guess, “the beginning” “the process” “the end”. Let’s start!

I came here on August 16. I was really excited. Before I left Turkey I had a good conversation with the Talent manager of Oview (we don’t like to use the term Human Resources, as people are not resources). She explained me everything about Amsterdam and Oview. I prepared and took the step into the great wide open. I got to Oview as a content developer. I was responsible to create questions for our app.

I searched for worldwide news and looked what issues were hot. In order to measure peoples’ opinion about these issues I created unbiased yes-or-no questions and supplied them with news articles from many different sources. These question would be edited by the question moderators and ta daa, the questions were ready and the answers would be clear. This app truly makes your opinion count.

For a while the process of content creation got put on hold. During this period I shifted through other departments such as community development, marketing development, campaign processing etc. I got to learn how to use many different operating systems, such as Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu, and Linux Mint, as I was struggling to find a compatible OS which made me feel more comfortable than Windows. I the end a brilliant computer engineer of Oview helped me to achieve it. I learned how to use social media and how to communicate with people who have the same vision and goals as I do. Besides all that I have helped creating a new vision for democracy, which is a digital democracy.

I feel that in this modern democracy we are spreading our thoughts, opinions on social media, but somehow we can’t seem to gather all our opinions and create a public power in order to influence the leaders of our countries. For this we need a platform. We need clear answers to our questions and aggregated data that shows us the opinion of all of the people. And Oview is building this platform. Also I need to add that this is a very decent approach in the history of theories of democracy.

Eventually we’ve come to section three. I want to say that Oview has taught me a lot of things about the world we live in, the system in which we struggle to reach our goals, and how we can improve the community we live in. It has been one of the best experiences in my life since 23 years. Lastly, your opinion counts!

Uğur Ç.

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Oview, our App, and our Vision

What is Oview?

Oview is a mobile application that gathers opinions and presents them in cohesive and user-friendly graphics. It’s a new and revolutionary form of surveying and polling. The app presents users with questions that can be answered with yes or no. These questions come with many news articles from many different sources, so users can read news and background information on the questions they are going to answer. Once you’ve answered a question, you will see how other users from all over the world have answered this question. in anonymous demographics such as age, gender, and education.

Why would you use this app?

Ask your burning questions to the world and get a massive response

Why use the app? There’s multiple sides to this coin. For starters, because it’s fun. You can ask all your burning questions and get a response from the entire world. What’s more, you will even be able to see where everyone is from, their gender, how old they are, and if they went to school or not. You will get a very nuanced overview of how people in the world think about your questions. The most special feature of our app is that users are the ones who upload the questions.

Get your opinion accross

We’re also aware of the fact that in this world, many people disagree with they way things work, with the decisions that our governments take for us. Maybe we would even like to change something, but there’s no way we can make our voice be heard. In a time where thousands of opinions are shared every day, it’s difficult to get noticed. That’s why we’re making an app that collects all these opinions in a comprehensible app, so that you can see what people’s opinions about various issues at a glance. All topics you can think of are arranged in categories, like politics, finance, health, environment, art, sports, and entertainment, so you can easily search the topics you’re interested in.

Get the news from sources all around the world in one App

Another great use for this app is that it shows news from many different sources in one place. There are always many sides to a story, many different ways to look at it, and different background stories. Often groups of new channels have a preference for one particular side of the story. As all our questions come with at least 5 articles from different channels (ranging from BBC, CNN and Fox News to Russia Today and Al Jazeera). We want to provide you with as many different stories as possible. This way you can compare them and form you own opinion, rather than getting a one-sided view from you local news channel.