Starting position

“Stiftung Risiko-Dialog”, the University of Zurich (UZH), the City of Zurich (ZH) and “Genossenschaft POSMO” are investigating how individuals can be motivated to donate personal data in order to serve a public cause in a the project “Datenspende für gemeinnützige Lösungsansätze”. The public cause focused on in this project is public mobility. The project team will be implementing an operative use case in the City of Zurich in order to enhance efficiency for sustainable mobility (e.g. bike, public transport etc.). “Genossenschaft POSMO'' developed an application that is able to geotrack the movements of the app’s users. This data provides information about movement patterns and also evaluates the means of transportation (by foot, car or bike etc.). Based on this data the city of Zurich could, for example, better coordinate the development of bike trails. Members of the “Genossenschaft POSMO” can decide for themselves whether they want to share their mobility data and can turn on and off the tracking via the app. The members of  “Genossenschaft POSMO” are also able to decide what purposes their data can be used for while an ethics council overviews this process. The goal is to recruit around 500 citizens of Zurich for this use case in order to track their movements and learn which communication elements are motivating individuals to donate their personal data. 

Aim of the project

The main aim of the project is to understand how individuals can be motivated to donate personal data to serve a public cause. For this purpose the project team plans to conduct a series of experiments with regard to the communication in the above-described use case. Experiments will test the effectiveness of different communication/information channels (e.g. official letter or social media), the effectiveness of incentives (monetary vs. moral) and the influence of the UX design.

 Students will develop, in cooperation with the project team the visual and mobilizing communication elements, that will be integrated into the existing POSMO app. In addition, the students will support and develop the communication campaign in order to promote the use case.

About the collaboration partner

Stiftung Risiko-Dialog 

For over 30 years the independent platform «Stiftung Risiko-Dialog» has pursued the goal of developing innovative, viable solutions and framework conditions in a participative manner to understand technological innovations, changes in the environment, and social change. In doing so, it cooperates with the respective partners from civil society, research, economy, authorities, politics from Switzerland and abroad.

Your main contacts:

Nathalie Klauser is deputy managing director and project manager at the Stiftung Risiko-Dialog. She is a communication and political scientist (M.A.) and gained experience in the field of digitalization in building and managing startups, through her work at the Chair of Computational Social Science at ETH and digital Citizen Science projects at the University of Zurich. She is also a board member at Smart City Alliance and CH++.

Kimon Arvanitis is project manager at Stiftung Risiko-Dialog. He is a political scientist (M.A.) and in his master thesis, he conducted a quantitative study on how different perceptions of social mobility in Europe influence the electoral success of right-wing populist parties. At Credit Suisse, he gained experience in project management and was involved in business risk and various projects in the field of digitalization.