Co-Creation Workshop – Towards more Responsible and Sustainable AI, Data & Tech – One Prototype at a Time

“Because we want every line of code to make a responsible and positively sustainable difference to the world.”

On March 26, we brought together a remarkably diverse cross-section of our programmatic and support ecosystem – from researchers, public sector professionals and responsible AI and open source advocates to angel investors, philanthropists, and NGO practitioners – for a potent and energetic co-creation workshop to interrogate and co-shape the future of the @Prototype Fund Switzerland.

This was not a consultation, nor a focus group, but a genuinely collaborative creation session, led skillfully by our program lead and Opendata.ch Co-CEO Dr. Verena Kontschieder, phenomenal facilitator David Suhr and guest contributor Sophie Tomlinson.

Community members might have arrived considering themselves participants, but they left as true co-creators around the topic of Responsible and Sustainable AI, Data, and Tech as well as experimental approaches to the governance – both product and policy – of the former.

Together, we explored how the Prototype Fund – its origin being an early-stage tech-for-god incubator – can evolve, and which potential pathways might get us there. What emerged were insights we couldn’t have reached alone. They were grounded in lived experience, and shaped by the expertise, authentic suggestions, and professional concerns at the heart of the invited crowd.. 

Operating out of the heart of responsible technology?

As the host country of the 2027 global AI Summit, we are proud to recognize the unique and fascinating ecosystem we are privileged to operate in. 

In addition to being a European hub for major globally operating tech players, we are home to world-class research centres and hold a long track record of democratic, locally-led governance. 

To add an additional layer of intentional community-building, we chose to hold our co-creation workshop in a venue which was also hosting After the Algorithm, a ten-day immersive AI literacy festival that brought everyone from retirees to pre-teens on a journey through algorithmic thinking. That juxtaposition between the global and the deeply provincial is where honest conversations about AI tend to live.

What the conversations surfaced

Five themes emerged clearly from our discussions:

Responsible AI needs a method, not just a manifesto. The term “responsible AI” risks becoming “aspiration without application”. 

Participants were vigilant on this point: how do we operationalize these principles in real projects, with real constraints? 

The Prototype Fund’s iterative, experimentation-led methodology is part of the answer, and global initiatives in the experimental data and AI space, like policy prototypes, agility in governance, or sandboxes, offer useful models to learn from.

Funding public interest tech is a structural challenge. As philanthropic budgets are stretched thin and venture capital remains focused on bottom lines, the question of how to fund tech for good at scale grows urgent to us.

One participant asked pointedly whether responsible and sustainable AI should be evaluated through profit margins at all. 

The Prototype Fund sees an opportunity here in:

• mapping networks of aligned funders, 
• brokering partnerships, and 
• helping articulate the case for public interest tech on its own terms.

Switzerland’s democratic DNA is an asset. The regional distribution of power and Switzerland’s culture of participatory governance creates a distinctive opportunity: can this country use its subsidiary, multi-level governance  structures to ensure AI genuinely reaches people’s lives and local communities? This was one of the more generative questions of the day, which we are continuing to sit with.

What constitutes “Swissness” can be a strategic edge. Participants encouraged us to anchor future Prototype Fund work into areas where Switzerland has genuine depth: environmental sustainability, democratic infrastructure, public value, and digital sovereignty. These aren’t just areas of national expertise; they may well become the defining themes of the 2027 Summit too.

With complex challenges comes a greater need for coordination. The most powerful response is purpose-driven, institutional alignment. Mapping networks, sharing challenges, distributing ownership, and building common cause across silos may be one of the highest-leverage things an organization like the Prototype Fund can do.

Why this matters to us

The Prototype Fund has invested five years into demonstrating that technology can be built with positive social impact in mind from the very beginning. That’s what we teach. And this kind of workshop, the kind that’s messy, and constructive while remaining genuinely collaborative and implementation-oriented, is how we stay accountable to that belief.

Thank you to everyone who attended and brought their expertise and candour to the table. A special thank you to Sophie Tomlinson from the Datasphere Initiative, David Suhr from Consense Philanthropy Consulting, and our Prototype Fund and Opendata.ch team. This work belongs to all of us.

Our next project recruitment round is coming up soon. If you want to join our collaboration ecosystem, either as a participant or as a co-implementing partner, please reach out.

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