“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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We are looking for a dedicated individual with project management and communications experience to continue managing our Prototype Fund (and possibly more). Become part of an agile non-profit, a fantastic team and a great mission: fostering open technologies by and for the people in Switzerland!

Preparing means looking back to learn before moving forward and trying to improve. This is why we systematically evaluated the project applications submitted in spring 2020 for the first funding round of the Prototype Fund. The first funding cycle came to an end with the Demo Day on 2 March at 5.30pm and the second funding round starts on 7 April 2021.

At Opendata.ch and Stiftung Mercator Switzerland, we value transparency and we therefore want to share our findings about the applications received. We started with few expectations about how many applications we would receive and from whom. We were surprised and impressed by the number, quality, and diversity of the projects and the project teams. Our own evaluation identifies some room for improvement – but hey, who doesn’t have that? We already thank you for supporting us to perform at least as well in 2021.

Who wanted to prototype in 2020?

In total, 63 project applications were submitted. The creativity and breath of the ideas were impressive. Figure 1 shows that projects addressed all dimensions of the policy cycle. A majority of projects sought to enable digital democration participation by providing information  (19.5%), which allows citizens and residents to exchange information on specific problems and to understand individual needs or major patterns and trends, and to better informing citizens and residents (16.7%). Tools for proposing ideas (12.4%), taking decisions (11.4%) and other activities (11.4%) were also prominently represented. Each project could tick up to four dimensions to situate their project in the policy cycle.

We aimed for a diverse mix of innovative project ideas as well as for diverse teams. We are convinced that having a (almost) 360° perspective of the challenge tackled is important for the design of a relevant and useful tool for democratic participation. Our impression was that many teams and especially those on the short list of the jury were highly interdisciplinary although we cannot prove it quantitatively. Other aspects of diversity can be more readily described. For example, Team size ranged from one to six with half of applications having four or more team members with most teams consisting of five members (Figure 2).

We present further key figures in Table 1. The average age of the members in a given team was 35. The youngest team had an average age of 25 while the most experienced one was about 55. Most project teams requested close to 100,000 CHF, the maximum amount available per project. Although we were open to funding some smaller projects, we did not receive many such applications.

Regarding gender and geographical diversity, we did decently but there is still room for improvement. We received one third of applications from a female project lead but almost three-quarter of applying team members were male. The French-speaking Swiss (Romands) were also underrepresented relative to their population share in Switzerland (22.8%) with 10% as main applicants (i.e. submitting applicant) and representing 13% of all applicants. Figure 3 shows that applicants live all across Switzerland and even abroad at the time of application. A high share of applicants is based in Zurich. Note that the data is available for a subsample of applicants only. 

Our goal was also to signal openness to non-Swiss citizens which do not have the right to vote in most municipalities and cantons. We succeeded in this endeavor: one fifth of all Prototype Fund applicants did not hold Swiss citizenship.

Who got selected for prototyping?

The five winning projects were at least as diverse as the pool of project applications. Together, their projects cover most dimensions of the policy cycle. The selected teams were highly interdisciplinary, and, except for one, of mixed gender. Age-wise, the team members ranged from recent design graduates and ETH students to experienced IT professionals and pedagogues.

One team was made up from people living in different French-speaking cantons while the other four teams worked in their respective home offices scattered over several Swiss German cantons. Some people spoke neither German nor French nor did they hold the Swiss citizenship but were increasingly fascinated by Swiss democracy.

Will you be prototyping from September 2021?                           

In 2021, we aim again for innovative and high-quality applications from diverse teams from all over Switzerland. We will make special efforts to make the Prototype Fund better known in French-speaking Switzerland, to promote the program among female activists and techies, and aim to receive at least one application from the Ticino in this second funding round.

We look forward to your application! Applications will open at the end of March. Do not hesitate to contact us with your questions.

«Kein Bock auf Demokratie! Politik ist viel zu kompliziert und schlussendlich entscheiden eh die Alten». Egal ob das stimmt oder nicht, aber immerhin gibt uns die Demokratie auch die Werkzeuge in die Hand, um das zu ändern. Doch der Umgang damit will zuerst erlernt werden. Denn nur wer ein Verständnis dafür entwickelt, wie unser Umfeld und unser Land mit Engagement und Partizipation entwickelt werden kann, wird sich auch an den demokratischen Prozessen beteiligen.

Online Werkzeugkiste für politische Bildung

Genau hier setzt voty.ch an. Mit einer Online-Werkzeugkiste für die politische Bildung in Schulen wollen wir helfen, ein Verständnis für die Schweizer Demokratie zu fördern und erste Erfahrungen mit demokratischen Prozessen zu ermöglichen. Nach zahlreichen Gesprächen mit Lehrer*innen und Bildungsorganisationen haben wir nach zwei Monaten Prototyping Anfang November 2020 unser Abstimmungstool lanciert. In Zusammenarbeit mit «easyvote.ch» haben wir Schulklassen aufgefordert, die «Konzernverantwortungsinitiative» und das «Kriegsmaterialgesetz» im Unterricht zu diskutieren, um dann eine Online-Abstimmung durchzuführen. Dabei haben 11 Klassen auf Stufe Sek-1, Gymnasium und Berufsschule mitgemacht, debattiert und schlussendlich ihre Meinung kundgetan. Von den beteiligten Lehrpersonen haben wir wertvolles Feedback erhalten, welches bereits wieder in unsere Plattform eingeflossen ist.

Wir wollen die Stimme der Jugend repräsentieren

Unser Ziel ist es, über tausend Jugendliche abstimmen zu lassen, um so die Jugend in aktuellen politischen Fragen zu repräsentieren und ihr eine Stimme zu geben. Das hat beim ersten Mal noch nicht ganz gereicht, doch wir bleiben dran, werden unser Abstimmungsmodul weiterentwickeln und für den nationalen Urnengang vom März (E-ID Gesetz, Stopp-Palmöl, Verhüllungsverbot) ab dem 5. Februar für Schulklassen aufschalten. 

Digitale Lerninhalte und Diskussionsformate

Gleichzeitig entwickeln wir ein Angebot an digitalen Lerninhalten für die politische Bildung. Neben einer Auswahl an Videos von «SRF mySchool» und dem Bot «Chaty», der Grundbegriffe der Demokratie erklärt, stehen vor allem interaktive Tools (Einzel- oder Gruppenarbeiten) im Vordergrund. Auch die Möglichkeit der Online-Diskussion mit der Klasse ist integriert und ergänzt so die Debatte im Klassenzimmer. 

Kennen Sie engagierte Lehrpersonen (Sek-1/Gymnasium/Berufsschule), welche unsere Online-Werkzeugbox ausprobieren und mitgestalten möchten? Dann schicken Sie sie unbedingt auf voty.ch

“smartask” allows citizens to share their questions, concerns or ideas directly with national parliamentarians. It aims to enable the interaction between citizens and law makers and hence to encourage political participation. In the process of developing such a platform we learned that there is no such thing as failure, as long as you adapt your approach and try again.

So far so good

Before we started prototyping we conducted interviews with three parliamentarians. As they are part of one of our two main target groups, it was important for us to get early feedback and inputs from them. As useful as these interviews were, they also presented the first challenge: to get appointments within the set timeline. As soon as your next steps depend on previous ones, your timeline can easily be blown up. The same lesson applies to user-testing. It is a constant tradeoff between speed and accuracy and we had to learn to find the right balance. For the interviews this meant that although we could not conduct the number we had planned, we still received some qualitative feedback which allowed us to  proceed with confidence. 

…key learning: “Dream big. Start small. But most of all, start.”

Simon Sinek

Part time gives us a hard time

The project team is a joint venture between Politools (Political Research Network) and Liip AG. People from various backgrounds, different places and with diverse work schedules come together for weekly meetings. The common denominator is that most of us work part time – which turned out to be the next challenge: what’s done today can sometimes only be reviewed tomorrow and if necessary changed the day after tomorrow. The fact that everything happens virtually these days makes it somewhat easier, which allowed the following solution: Daily and very short morning-meetings during IT sprint sessions help to quickly exchange on what everyone is planning to work on that day and to ask questions to whoever is available. This guarantees the flow of information and keeps the motivation high.

…key learning: “If a picture is worth a thousand words, a prototype is worth a thousand meetings”

Tom & David Kelley, IDEO

Prototype vs. MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

Since prototyping started in September, ideas have turned into tangible forms. User experience constantly improves, design concepts are refined and more features are implemented. At the end of the day you find yourself pondering over whether a button should be dark yellow or rather pastel. It happens quite often that we lose ourselves in such details instead of putting these resources into other, more important aspects of the tool. Therefore, we have to remind ourselves from time to time that it is all about the minimum viable product and that our primary goal is a functional prototype – not the final product (yet). 😉

…key learning: “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler”

by Albert Einstein

In September, we kicked off the 3rd iteration of Projekt CH+, together with the Prototype Fund. Our new prototype will  be more playful than previous versions. We are Sophie, Emma, Oliver and Florian, an interdisciplinary team of game designers and we are the youngest team at the Prototype Fund. What we lack in experience, we make up with enthusiasm… and maybe one or two jokes, while we’re at it. Our passion for developing educational games has brought us together. Looking back at the last four months, we can confidently state: Our learnings have made us grow up so much, we feel like we might no longer be the youngest team.

So, does old age come with wisdom? We’ll let you be the judge of that:

Communicating

Game development brings people with various skill sets together. Gameplay, visuals, music and content creators meet to create unique experiences for users. In our case, Emma and Sophie design the visuals, Oliver and Florian write the code. Those who work on a given day, meet online on a daily basis to coordinate and work with visual mockups early on to ensure that we are all on the same page. Even though team meetings do take time from other, seemingly more productive activities, they are absolutely worth the time as we have come up with unique and creative solutions.

Scoping

We are shooting for the moon. As a team, we are not very fond of playing it safe. Where’s the fun in that? Maybe it is the fact that most of us spend quite some of our free time in fantastic game worlds is one of the reasons why we aim for fantastical outcomes in our work. While we continue to aim for the moon, we have learned to plan our journey and know that we need a couple of pit stops before our moon landing.

Being Flexible

While project timelines and development plans provide stability, these plans should not be set in stone while prototyping. Especially when working with an iterative approach, new challenges pop up on a regular basis. Even if we love our initial ideas, staying open to and seeking constructive criticism and implementing feedback even if it means adjusting timelines is key for reaching the moon one day.

Now, dear reader, if you think that all these points are pretty obvious, you are perfectly right. But – a big BUT (and we cannot lie): we’ve realised that there is a big difference between knowing these things and experiencing them.

We are trying to use the best of what game design has to offer in order to make political self-education fun and entertaining for all ages but especially young voters. This is not an easy task and we are constantly being challenged, in our technical fields of expertise but also in our first experiences as a young team under pressure to perform to our own, but also external expectations and aims. In the end, it all comes down to playing towards each other’s strengths and pulling towards the same vision.

Wagen wir die digitale Demokratie oder verzichten wir vorerst auf eine breit abgestützte und zeitgemässe Partizipation? Mit dem Projekt “owlly” wollen wir die Schweizer Demokratie ins 21. Jahrhundert befördern! Wir verfolgen das Ziel, E-Collecting, also das Sammeln, Bescheinigen und Zählen von Unterschriften für Volksbegehren, in der Schweiz zu ermöglichen.

Während der letzten drei Monate durften wir einiges lernen und haben folgende Erfahrungen gemacht, welche wir mit euch teilen möchten:

Austausch

In zahlreichen Gesprächen mit Bürgerinnen und Bürgern, Vertreter*innen aus der Regierung und Campaigner*innen konnten wir viel Lehrreiches über die bisherige Debatte, die Ängste und Sorgen, aber auch die Chancen für E-collecting erfahren. Dabei konnten wir unseren eigenen Wissensstand und somit unseren Horizont erweitern. Das ist insofern wichtig, weil sich noch niemand an eine ganzheitliche Umsetzung von E-Collecting gewagt hat. Bisherige Projekte und politische Vorstösse haben sich jeweils nur mit einem Teilprozess von E-Collecting befasst.

Interdisziplinäres Team

Unser Team besteht aus fünf jungen Männern. Nicht gerade das, was man sich in erster Linie unter einem ausgewogenen Team vorstellt. Dennoch ermöglichen uns die verschiedenen beruflichen Hintergründe das Thema aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln zu betrachten. So haben wir neben einem Software Entwickler und Produktmanager auch einen Geografen, einen Maschinenbauer und einen Grafiker in unseren Reihen. Auch machen verschiedene Nationalitäten und Wohnorte die Zusammenarbeit interessant und lassen viele Einflüsse und Ansichten ins Projekt einfliessen.

Bleib in Bewegung

Von Anfang an haben wir uns zum Ziel gesetzt, jederzeit ein MVP (Minimum Viable Product) zu haben. Zu diesem Zweck haben wir unser Projekt schon zu Beginn in fünf verschiedene Streams aufgeteilt und pro Stream alle zwei Wochen einen Feedback-Loop eingebaut. Das hat uns ermöglicht, jederzeit über einen Teil des Projekts ein Feedback einzuholen. Da wir vor allem in der ersten Projektphase mit Papier-Konzepten oder Click-Dummys arbeiteten, konnten wir so sehr schnell Fehler machen, daraus lernen und die Verbesserungen mit der nächsten Iteration implementieren.

Abschliessend gibt es aber noch das kleine Virus, welches auch unsere Pläne beeinflusst hat, zu erwähnen. Was wir als Team aus den letzten Monaten mitnehmen, ist die Arbeitsweise, an die wir uns zuerst gewöhnen mussten. Wir haben uns alle aufgrund der Corona Situation noch nie zu fünft “in echt” getroffen und vermissen langsam den direkten und persönlichen Austausch. Trotz allem ist es aber auch erstaunlich, was wir bis jetzt trotz dieser Herausforderungen als Team schon erreichen konnten. Wir freuen uns schon jetzt auf ein spannendes Jahr 2021. Denn eines ist für uns jetzt schon sicher: Nach dem Corona Jahr, wo das Sammeln von Unterschriften an seine Grenzen gekommen ist, wird im 2021 das Thema E-Collecting definitiv auf der politischen Agenda der Schweiz landen. 

En Suisse, la politique semble ne jamais s’arrêter. Les réseaux sociaux s’animent de campagnes de votation et d’élection en permanence. Durant l’automne 2020, l’équipe du projet FairElection a rencontré 6 représentant-es de partis politiques à travers la Romandie, avec une incursion par visioconférence en Suisse alémanique. Nous avons parlé élections, primaires et procédures de choix au moment d’établir des listes de candidat-es. A chaque conversation, la même impression: une campagne est toujours en route, les comités et secrétariats de partis ne se mettent jamais sur pause. A travers les vertes contrées d’Helvétie, une élection est toujours en préparation, avec ses comités, ses soutiens, ses coups de fils et ses esquisses d’affiches. Dans ce tourbillon d’activités, tous nos interlocuteurs expliquent que, par-dessus tout, la politique consiste avant tout dans la gestion d’équipe, de l’humain, avec des hommes et des femmes qui veulent se mettre au service de la population. Dans cette gestion d’équipe, le moment du choix des candidat-es est une phase particulièrement tendue. Luttes intestines et conflits d’ego sur fond de grandes déclarations du parti semblent programmés.

Un outil pour la sélection des candidat-es dans les partis politiques

Prenant acte de ces défis, nous rencontrons ces représentant-es de parti pour leur proposer une innovation politique. Grâce au soutien du programme “Prototype Fund”, initiative commune de l’association OpenData et de la Fondation Mercator Suisse, nous sommes en train de développer un outil pour accompagner les partis dans leur processus interne de sélection de candidat-es. L’outil s’appelle “FairElection” et nous voulons en faire un instrument de travail pour tous les partis du pays. 

FairElection permets aux partis de mener et d’expliciter une discussion sur le type de candidat-es qu’ils veulent mettre sur leur liste. Tous nos interlocuteurs ont confirmé que l’ambition de représenter leurs électeurs-trices était cruciale. Pour ce faire, une méthode efficace consiste à choisir des candidat-es qui ressemblent à la population, au moins dans les grandes lignes. La population est diverse ? Les candidat-es à une responsabilité politique devraient l’être aussi afin de renforcer le sentiment d’appartenance des citoyen-nes et de garantir les meilleures décisions politiques possibles.

Bien sûr, les partis rencontrés n’ont pas tous les mêmes objectifs de représentation. Pour certains, la question de l’égalité des genres est clef et les listes sont d’ores et déjà paritaires. Pour d’autres, ce sont plutôt les domaines d’activité qui doivent être mieux représentés, ou les régions, ou encore les différents groupes d’âge. L’outil “FairElection” veut être la plateforme de ce débat, à mener directement au sein des partis: quelle diversité voulons-nous sur nos listes de candidat-es? A quelle population voulons-nous ressembler? Une fois que ces critères sont fixés, comment les appliquer à la sélection de nos candidat-es? Sur la base des réponses choisies par le parti, l’algorithme FairElection met en oeuvre les critères de représentation.