CV
I work at the interface of science, technology, society and politics. What runs through it is organizations: I start them, and I build them to carry on without me. Where an organization is not the right instrument, the work becomes policy.
Now
- 2020 – CH++, founder and president. A think tank and advocacy organization for scientific and technological literacy in Swiss politics.
- 2014 – crstl, founder. Strategy and intervention work out of Zurich, for the public sector, research institutions, media and foundations.
- 2018 – Pro Helvetia, board member, elected by the Federal Council. The Swiss Arts Council, with a focus on digital culture and on where the arts meet science and technology.
- 2020 – Prototype Fund Switzerland, initiator and jury president. Public funding for civic technology prototypes.
Built
- 2007 – 2026 Liip, co-founder, chair of the board from 2016. Grew past 200 people and became the first large Swiss company to run on Holacracy.
- 2011 – 2023 Opendata.ch, co-founder and vice-president. Put open government data on the Swiss political agenda and kept it there.
- 2014 – 2025 wemakeit, board member. Switzerland’s crowdfunding pioneer, sold in 2022 to its own community of 5,500 shareholders.
- 2017 – 2024 Powercoders, board member. A programming school for refugees, built with the State Secretariat for Migration, the cantons and the industry.
- 2017 – 2019 SENS, co-founder, with National Councillor Eric Nussbaumer. Started as CooperativeSuisse, today the national umbrella body for social entrepreneurship in Switzerland.
- 2003 – 2007 Mediagonal, co-founder. The first company, alongside my studies, and the one that merged into Liip.
What came of it
CH++ contributed to Switzerland’s digital pandemic response, to the federal act on the use of electronic means (EMBAG), to the electronic identity, and to the creation of the Federal Office for Cybersecurity. Opendata.ch worked on the national open data strategy and on putting it to use across all three levels of the federal system.
Before
- 2012 – 2016 Lift Conference, curator and host in Geneva, Marseille, Seoul, Shanghai and Basel. Sessions on the sharing economy, political participation and artificial intelligence, from the idea to the stage.
- 2012 – 2015 Skim.com, co-founder and CTO. A mobile game, built by a team spread across Berlin, Zurich and Kyiv.
- 2011 etoy.com, operating member of the media art collective, for the opening exhibition of Kunsthalle Gwangju.
- 2001 – 2003 Zurich University of the Arts and others, lecturer in mobile application design.
Studied
Computer science with communication and media studies at the Université de Fribourg, bilingually in French and German. A research semester at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute in Galway on the semantic web, with peer-reviewed papers and a W3C working group. Later: the AGI Strategy and Frontier AI Governance courses at BlueDot Impact. Public policy analysis at the LSE, sustainability in the boardroom at IMD, Holacracy practitioner training.
Languages
German, French and English daily. Italian and Spanish passively. Latin at school.
Elsewhere
The exhaustive version, with the awards and the committee seats this page leaves out, is on LinkedIn. For anything else, write to hannes@gassert.ch.