WeRobotics Turns 10!

In the Beginning

In September 2015, four people made a decision based on a shared conviction: if drones and robotics were to serve social good at scale, they could not remain concentrated in the Global North. They had to also be in the hands of local experts in Global South who understood their own contexts intimately. Scaling impact meant scaling local ownership.

The rest, as they say, is history. 

But today, let us not just say it.  It is good to look back — with a gratitude that sharpens our seeing as we step forward. What we stand on today was once only an idea spoken in hope. 

In 2016 — initial paperwork done and website live — a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation made it possible to test an idea that would define the decade: local knowledge hubs for drone applications in Nepal, Tanzania, and Peru. The proof-of-concept phase lasted 18 months. It asked difficult questions. Out of our search for answers emerged what would become the Flying Labs Network.

Learning to Walk

With additional resources from the Hewlett Foundation, the Autodesk Foundation, IDB’s Bid-Lab, and other funders came exciting growth. In 2017 we carried out our first locally led medical cargo drone projects and strengthened drone and data capacity. Our team expanded. New Flying Labs opened in Fiji and Panama, exploring drone applications in the South Pacific and Central America. 

More importantly, demand grew organically. Expressions of interest flowed in from 10 additional countries — local experts wanted to know how they could start their own Flying Labs. This was our cue to find a way to scale local expertise, and in March 2018, the Flying Labs Network was born, based on a social franchise model. The same year, 12 Flying Labs joined the Network. One of the early highlights was our first in-person meeting at our first Global Flying Labs retreat in early 2019 in New York.

As the Network grew, so did our partner ecosystem as well as the WeRobotics team, which by then included drone and data technical support, finance, communications, Human Resources, and, crucially, Network coordination and facilitation. Growth brought new questions: How do you scale without centralizing power? How do you maintain high standards without imposing control?

The Courage to Realign

In 2020, the world became smaller in a way none of us had chosen, and even as a team already used to working through screens and across time zones, we felt the moment keenly. The wisdom of localization became undeniable: Flying Labs did not need to wait for international deployments; they were already embedded in their communities. We saw the resilience of our model. We saw also that the time was ripe to reflect on the challenging questions.  

What does equity look like when it is not a sentence on a website but a structure you must live inside? If we believed that local experts should lead, were we willing to reorganize ourselves accordingly?

Together with Flying Labs, we co-created a governance model for the Network that would cultivate growth not only in size but also in strength, allowing Flying Labs to become stronger both independently and interdependently. We set up a knowledge-sharing platform to enable expertise to flow quicker among Flying Labs. We launched a first version of a council to help us learn with Flying Labs how to improve governance and joint decision making.

We turned the mirror on ourselves. We reviewed our Board of Directors to ensure it reflected the geographies of our work. We made the deliberate decision to hire new team members exclusively from the continents where Flying Labs operate. We adopted a Holacracy-inspired organizational model — imperfect perhaps but intentional and evolving — to create more openness, shared authority, and closer collaboration within our own organization. We wanted our internal structure to resemble the world we were advocating for: less hierarchical, more participatory, more honest about power.

And then we made one of the most difficult decisions in our organizational history.

Our engineering department in Switzerland had grown to represent nearly half of our team. It was strong, capable, and deeply committed. Still, if we were serious about localization, we could not continue to centralize technical power in Europe. It costs something to shift power. It asks for courage, for coherence between what you say and what you do. Closing this department, and essentially reducing our team by 50%, was walking the talk, being true to the power of local.

By 2022, six years into the Flying Labs experiment and two years into this deeper organizational transition, we were ready to pause and take stock. We gathered our tensions, missteps, and breakthroughs and published our first localization report, offering our learnings to other international organizations grappling with similar questions. We followed up with a more detailed report in 2023.

But reflection is best done together. With the Network now comprising more than 30 Flying Labs, we convened in Nairobi, Kenya, for our second global retreat. It was the first time many of us had been in the same physical space. We looked back at what we had built. What had worked? What needed revision? What kind of Network did we want to become? There was honesty. There was debate. There was laughter. But we all understood that this journey was still unfolding and that we were going far together.

Further Together

Based on the collective wisdom shared by Flying Labs on what direction to take, 2023 was a year for new beginnings. We refined and streamlined our internal processes, not just for greater efficiency but also so that we could show up more fully for Flying Labs. We grew our team intentionally, strengthening coordination, M&E, and communication. And we asked ourselves another question: how can we make collaboration — among Flying Labs, between WeRobotics and the Network, and with our partners become even more meaningful?

Our focus lay in creating more spaces for the connections that allow people to think and build together. Regional retreats made space for more geographically contextual conversations. Sector expertise hubs facilitated closer collaboration across knowledge clusters and geographies. We started co-organizing conferences with Flying Labs, joined forces for larger projects between Flying Labs, partners of our global partner ecosystem and us, to learn how together, we can create stronger solutions, including for regulations and policies, that can scale across all geographies of the Flying Labs Network. And building on what we had learned from the first Council, we launched the Flying Labs Network Council to formalize shared strategic stewardship of the Network. 

In 2022, we also offered our Glocalization Model for the first time for “adoption” to other organizations. To date, 4 organizations have adopted our approach to (g)localization, including for the education and health sectors. 

Over the past few years, the milestones we have celebrated have not been ours alone. They have been shared with Flying Labs and with the wide ecosystem of funders and partners who believe, as we do, in the Power of Local. As we look back on what we have achieved and the impact we have created, we know this much: it has been possible only because we chose, from the very beginning, to go further together. Much more than the tech, what mattered was the relationships. 

To all of you who have walked this journey with us, we extend our deepest gratitude, and we look forward to turning the bend in the road together.