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Good practice Imported

Komitee Equal Shares — Winterthur's Sortition Committee Allocates CHF 378,901 With a Co-Designed Proportional Algorithm

Switzerland · Winterthur · See the Switzerland profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 32% 67/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

38 Winterthur residents drawn by lot allocated CHF 378,901 to 43 of 121 cultural applications in March 2025 using Komitee Equal Shares, a co-designed proportional rule splitting each member's virtual budget 50:50 between their point vote and collective impact fields.

CHF 378,901
Total funds allocated (March 2025)
43 of 121
Applications funded (March 2025)
CHF 8,812
Average grant per funded project (March 2025)
CHF 3,000-40,000
Per-project request range (March 2025)
250 invited, 42 accepted, 38 served
Committee size (drawn by lot) (Nov 2024 - Mar 2025)
68.8% satisfied + 25.0% rather satisfied
Participant satisfaction with opportunity to participate (post-workshop survey, Mar 2025)
31% influenced, 22% mixed, 47% no change
Reported influence of the algorithm on decisions (post-workshop survey, Mar 2025)
Komitee Equal Shares — Winterthur's Sortition Committee Allocates CHF 378,901 With a Co-Designed Proportional Algorithm

Details

Maturity
Pilot
Promoter
Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte (SKKG) with ETH Zurich Computational Social Science
Period
2024–2025
Keywords
participatory budgeting, cultural funding, sortition, algorithmic allocation, civic participation, computational social choice

Context

The Kultur Komitee Winterthur is an annual participatory funding round, running since August 2021, in which a lottery-selected citizen committee decides which local cultural projects receive money. For the 2025 round, ETH Zurich's Computational Social Science group co-designed a new proportional allocation algorithm with the organisers.

Objectives

Deploy 'Komitee Equal Shares', a hybrid extension of the Method of Equal Shares that splits each committee member's virtual budget 50:50 between an individual point vote and eight collectively weighted 'impact fields', and evaluate participants' experience of it.

Activities

250 Winterthur residents were randomly drawn; 42 accepted and 38 served after four dropped out (20 men, 19 women; median age 52, range 25-79; 61.5% with tertiary education). The committee began work in November 2024 and held its decision workshop on 1 March 2025, reviewing 121 cultural-funding applications, with power to cut any request by up to 20%.

Results

The committee funded 43 of 121 applications with CHF 378,901 in total (average CHF 8,812 per project; per-project requests ranged CHF 3,000-40,000). A post-workshop survey of 32 of 36 attendees found 68.8% satisfied and a further 25.0% rather satisfied with their opportunities to participate; 31% said the algorithm influenced their decisions, 22% gave mixed answers and 47% reported no change; 47% said their perspective on culture in Winterthur had shifted.

Conclusions

The authors themselves note two limits: the committee was not fully representative of Winterthur's population because self-selection favoured older, more educated volunteers, and time pressure during the outcome reveal compromised the explainability of the procedure to participants. It is a governance precedent -- one of few live deployments of a proportional allocation rule with published survey evidence -- rather than a productivity story, and it distributes a private foundation's own funds, not a public budget.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Low (< €50k) — An academic co-design collaboration (ETH Zurich) applied to an existing annual private-foundation funding round; the algorithm itself is a low direct-cost computational addition, distinct from the CHF 378,901 in grants it allocated.
Time to results
Short (< 1 year) — Single cycle from committee kickoff (November 2024) to the decision workshop (1 March 2025), about four months, within an annual programme that has recurred since August 2021.
Staffing & skills
Stiftung für Kunst, Kultur und Geschichte (SKKG) programme organisers, ETH Zurich Computational Social Science researchers (algorithm co-design), 38 lottery-selected Winterthur resident committee members

Conditions for success

  • Co-design of the allocation rule with participants (they converged on the 50:50 point-vote/impact-field split as fairest)
  • Random selection (sortition) from the resident population for committee composition
  • Ability to cut individual funding requests by up to 20% for budget flexibility

Common failure modes

  • The committee was not fully representative of Winterthur's population: self-selection among those invited favoured older and more educated volunteers
  • Time pressure during the outcome reveal compromised the explainability of the procedure to participants
  • This hybrid voter-plus-impact-field variant has been deployed exactly once, so its behaviour at larger participant counts or budgets is untested

Where it fits

Governance type
private foundation running a public-participation process (not a public budget)
Scale
single mid-sized city, 38 participants, CHF 378,901
Income level
high-income

Commonly funded by

Philanthropic / foundation funding

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Data sources

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