Since 2022, around 130,000 Ukrainian refugees have been admitted to Switzerland within a short period of time. Cantonal offices, municipalities, NGOs, volunteers, and private actors all contributed to the response, but the crisis highlighted a central challenge: existing administrative systems were not designed to orchestrate diverse stakeholders under time pressure, fragmentation, and uncertainty.
This project investigated how the Government as a Platform (GaaP) approach can improve the orchestration of diverse stakeholders during crises, using the Ukrainian refugee crisis in the Canton of Zurich as the primary case study. The unprecedented speed and scale of the Ukrainian refugee crisis strained traditional administrative systems. The project team identified bottlenecks in digital crisis response, proposed and prototyped a Government as a Platform framework adapted to the Swiss context. GaaP transforms the public sector into an open platform that enables the orchestration of government agencies, private actors, NGOs, and citizens through a shared digital core, applications, and an ecosystem of complementors contributing services and innovation during crises.
The following work packages represent the main pillars of the project to achieve that vision.
Platform core
- “Crizzy” Platform Prototype: A central digital infrastructure serving as a “single point of entry” for refugees and organizations.
- eID for refugees: A decentralized eID solution that empowers refugees to manage their own identity data securely, reducing redundant paperwork for authorities.
Applications
- Data-driven AI solutions in crisis: tools for better informing during the crisis. RefuGPT is a LLM-based chatbot that integrates official government data with community insights. R2G (Refugees to Government) is a data-driven intelligence tool to provide policymakers with bottom-up insights into refugee needs.
- Hackathon for crisis apps: event to test the Government as a Platform concept within the Swiss context by bringing together multiple stakeholders—including developers, NGOs, and public
administrators—to co-create digital solutions for real-life crisis challenges
Ecosystem
- Estonian Case Study: a comparative analysis to evaluate the world-leading Estonian GaaP model and identify how a mature digital state architecture effectively orchestrated refugee support, providing a
benchmark for refining Switzerland’s transition from manual “silos” to an integrated digital ecosystem. - Governance-by-Action: a proposed mode of governance where coordination emerges through action rather than formal authority: roles overlap, decisions are made locally, and ownership is shared
collectively.
The findings demonstrate that GaaP can bridge the gap between the strengths of decentralized federal governance and the need for coordinated crisis response. By establishing common boundary resources (tools
and rules), the government can leverage the agility of the private sector and civil society without compromising safety or legitimacy.
This project provides a roadmap for the Canton of Zurich—and potentially the whole of Switzerland—to move toward a more resilient, human-centric, and digitally connected public sector.
Pubblications
All academic publications are listed here.
Core team:
Dr. Liudmila Zavolokina, UZH Digital Society Initiative
Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schwabe, UZH Institut für Informatik
Prof. Dr. Gianluca Miscione, ZHAW School of Management and Law
Practice partner:
SRK Schweizerisches Rotes Kreuz
Running time: 2023-2025
This project builds on the project “Government as/is a platform“, which was funded under the Rapid Action Call “Dealing with emergencies as a result of the war against Ukraine”.