Policy Kitchen is a policy crowdsourcing methodology developed by foraus – Swiss Forum on Foreign Policy. It enables a diverse network of thinkers to co-create policy recipes to pressing global challenges. The methodology is built on a crowd innovation platform, physical workshops, and a support process to bring the best recipes to impact.

Policy Kitchen is public and allows for bottom-up participation in the political process. Any person, irrespective of background or location, can participate and contribute ideas. To ensure a high level of expertise, we partner with experts and professionals of various sectors (science, government, international organizations, NPO, business, etc). Collaborations with the Open Think Tank Network and other partners allow us to scale participation internationally.

In just 1 year, it has generated 10 challenges, hosted 30 workshops, counted with more than 550 participants and produced 180 ideas to tackle issues such as Inclusion in Artificial Intelligence, Biodiversity loss, alignment between Business and Human Rights and more.

The code for Policy Kitchen is made available as open-source software. We encourage and support other actors in using participative methods in their respective domains. Contact us, we’re happy to help.

https://www.policykitchen.com/

• International

• Youth
• Older persons
• Women
• Indigenous and nomadic peoples
• People with disabilities
• The unemployed
• The poor
• Migrants
• Refugees and internally displaced people
• Remote and rural communities

The Policy Kitchen platform is based on an open-source solution that can be adapted by any interested party. Also, we have created an open knowledge repository where we share our methodology and guidelines. This can be adopted by any organization with our support to implement their own crowdsourcing exercise and take advantage of the collective intelligence.

As mentioned in the previous paragraph we use open source technology, which reduces significantly the cost of adoption. Also, financial sustainability is enabled by a decentralized and volunteer-driven engagement model of the community that helps to maintain a low cost of implementation.

Switzerland has a long story of direct participatory democracy, foraus as a swiss think tank has the open participation build into its DNA. With this project, we want to export the Swiss values of direct and participatory democracy to the world. Using Policy Kitchen, our digital platform we allow geographically disperse communities and thinkers to come together and solve pressing global issues. This directly related to the WSIS values of using ICT application to provide benefits in all aspects of life, in this case, participation in the democratic process. Our platform and methodologies also support the WSIS cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and local content. To promote this value we proactively seek horizontal and vertical diversity in our processes, encouraging the participation of everyone in the policymaking process no matter their socio-economic status, cultural identity, ethnic or religion. We believe that our project also supports the value of access to Information and Knowledge since all the content produced through the workshops and ideation processes is freely accessible online, including the policy publications that come as a result of every iteration. Finally, we strongly support the international and cooperation regional cooperation value by allowing disperse communities to interact through our platform, in order to achieve this we partner with a diversity of global organization and at the same time we help create new open think tanks that use our methodologies in other countries through our project called the Open Think Tank Network.