Building Blocks How Virginie Legros Guignard is using innovations in technology to rebuild communities across the globe.
The world we live in has become crazy. Some countries are on fire, others on the verge of famine or social disruption or armed conflict. Biodiversity has been severely impacted, the environment is being ransacked, climate change is racing away from us and nobody is reacting anymore.
Many people say that technology isolates us. That we spend so long on our computers or phones or tablets that we don’t see what’s around us, leaving us unable to form meaningful connections with others. However, what these people miss is the amazing, connective power of technology. That it can create, build and foster communities worldwide. That new innovations, rather than distancing us from each other, can ultimately bring us closer together.
Virginie Legros Guignard understands the transformative, life-altering effect of innovations in tech. Her organisation, COCÖÖÖN, set up in 2018, seeks to assist, repair and rebuild communities through the power of technology combined with the power of community. Read on to find out how.
Did you always want to be an entrepreneur?
I was a very creative child, prodigious in painting, making models and other figurative works. I later trained as an architect at the Lille School of Architecture and went on to work for an agency. While there, I developed a strong interest in technical management, supervising teams and project management.
I escaped a serious accident at the age of 28, which made me reevaluate my values and my core beliefs. By the age of 31, I decided to take a break from my career and pursue my passion for historical battle reconstruction, which lead to me becoming an international specialist and moving to Switzerland to pursue it further. From there, I became actively involved with ideas concerning collective intelligence, project management, AI, Blockchain and growth-hacking and how new technologies can bring us closer than ever before.
So what inspired you to come up with the idea for your organisation?
The world we live in has become crazy. Some countries are on fire, others on the verge of famine or social disruption or armed conflict. Biodiversity has been severely impacted, the environment is being ransacked, climate change is racing away from us and nobody is reacting anymore.
From all of my previous experience, I had seen the real-world implications and benefits of technology and community-building and I wanted to make a difference. The idea for COCÖÖÖN came after I took on the coordination of a MOOC (massive, open, online course) in 2016. We taught over 600 students throughout the French-speaking world, with over half residing in Africa. I saw the possibilities and life-changing advantages of technological innovation. It can create tangible differences for individuals and their communities.
COCÖÖÖN was born out of a desire to change the world through empowering people to find concrete solutions to the problems in both their immediate surroundings and the world at large. We work with a wide range of people, for example, victims of war from Daloa in Côte d’Ivoire, people relocated from Cameroon, those who find themselves homeless. We worked with them to find themselves a new home, a place in society, or the chance to return to their home region with a new, viable life project.
Enjoying this article?
Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss a story. No spam, ever.
Alexis Boddy
Writer
Alexis Boddy is a London-based writer, specialising in technology and business. She has also written for the stage and her fiction has been published around the world.
Related Articles
A Biochemist's Novel Imagines the Sense Humans Lost When Speech Began
Biochemist Christer Jansson's Genes of the Past uses a fictional 550,000-year-old Moroccan fossil to propose a sense ancient hominins lost when spoken words began replacing mental images.
NASA's Artemis 2 Mission Has Launched. It Will Not Land on the Moon, and That Is the Point
The first crewed flight beyond Earth orbit in 53 years is not a landing. It is the test that decides whether a landing is possible.
Meta Engineer Accidentally Leaked Sensitive Data Because They Followed an AI Agent's Advice
An internal AI agent told a Meta engineer how to fix a problem. They followed the instructions without verifying them and it exposed sensitive data for two hours.
