The Bevölkerungsrat 2025 focused on generating reform suggestions around one of Switzerland’s most urgent public challenges: rising healthcare costs. It is a topic that affects almost everyone, continues to worsen, and has proven difficult to solve through traditional political processes alone. At the same time, the assembly had a broader research goal: to create a blueprint for how national citizens’ assemblies can be designed and implemented effectively in Switzerland.

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Between November 2024 and March 2025, 100 randomly selected citizens from across Switzerland came together to learn, deliberate, and develop recommendations on how the healthcare system could become more sustainable.

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@gora supported the process as a digital companion for learning, preparation, exchange, and insight generation. A key contribution was the development of a comprehensive learning module that participants could access several weeks before the first assembly weekend. This gave them a clear, accessible knowledge base before entering the deliberation process — helping people arrive better prepared for a complex and emotionally charged topic.

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Throughout the process, @gora also supported polling, feedback collection, and app-based interaction data. These inputs helped generate insights into participants’ questions, priorities, learning progress, and reflections. Based on this data, we produced a comprehensive insights report that helped make the digital layer of the assembly visible and useful for evaluation, process design, and future citizens’ assembly formats.

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For us, one of the central learnings was how powerful early digital preparation and continuous insight generation can be. When participants are given time to explore the issue before meeting in person — and when their feedback is captured throughout the process — the live deliberation can start from a stronger shared foundation and evolve with a clearer understanding of what participants need.