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

The Kultur Komitee Winterthur is an annual participatory funding round that has run since August 2021. Each year a committee is drawn by lot from the Winterthur population and given final say over which local cultural projects receive money. For the 2025 round, researchers from ETH Zurich's Computational Social Science group worked with the organisers to co-design and deploy an allocation algorithm called Komitee Equal Shares.
The algorithm extends the Method of Equal Shares (MES), a proportional rule from computational social choice that gives every participant an equal share of the budget and charges the cost of each funded project to the people who supported it. The Winterthur variant adds a second signal. Half of each member's virtual budget was spent through their individual point vote — 20 points to distribute freely — and the other half through eight collectively defined impact fields, weighted by the committee itself (for example 'Curiosity & Learning' at 19% and 'Community & Connection' at 18%). Participants converged on the 50:50 split as the fairest design.
The numbers are documented. From 250 randomly drawn residents, 42 accepted and 38 served after four dropped out: 20 men and 19 women by the authors' count, median age 52, range 25 to 79, with 61.5% holding tertiary education. The committee kicked off in November 2024 and held its decision workshop on 1 March 2025. It reviewed 121 applications and funded 43 projects with CHF 378,901 in total, an average of CHF 8,812 per project, against a per-project request range of CHF 3,000 to CHF 40,000. The committee could cut a request by up to 20%, a rule it applied frequently.
A post-workshop survey was completed by 32 of the 36 attendees. 68.8% said they were satisfied with their opportunities to participate and a further 25.0% rather satisfied. Asked whether the algorithm changed their behaviour, 31% said it influenced their decisions, 22% gave mixed answers and 47% reported no change; 47% said their perspective on culture in Winterthur had shifted.
Two caveats belong in the record. The authors state plainly that the committee is not fully representative of Winterthur's population, because self-selection among those invited favoured older and more educated volunteers. They also report that time pressure during the outcome reveal compromised the explainability of the procedure to participants — a real limitation for any algorithmic allocation that asks citizens to trust a rule they cannot fully follow.
The case matters as a governance precedent rather than as a productivity story. It is one of the few live deployments of a proportional allocation rule with published survey evidence on how participants experienced it, alongside earlier MES rounds in Wieliczka (Poland) and Aarau (Switzerland). It is also not a government budget: SKKG is a private foundation distributing its own funds through a public-participation process, so the democratic mechanism transfers to public participatory budgeting more readily than the funding model does.

Read the full analysis: https://kulturkomitee.win/