success story
Publically crowd-source solutions
Foreign policies challenges by Policy Kitchen

Foraus is a Swiss Think Tank that shapes foreign policy through the promotion of open dialogue and informed decision making. With Open Social they built Policy Kitchen, an innovative online community platform to enable a diverse network of thinkers to find creative policy recipes to press foreign policy challenges.Β


“The Open Social platform, and especially the ideation feature we’ve built on top of it, is disrupting the way we create bottom-up policy advice in an international network of ‘open think tanks’. We’re very happy with the collaboration so far and look forward to a future where global challenges are solved by a connected global civil society.”
– Jonas Nakonz, Lead Policy Kitchen, Foraus
foraus’ Challenges
Foster Participatory Policy-making
Open Social’s Solution
Policy Kitchen Crowd Innovation Platform
Working closely with foraus to build an online community that meets their requirement, Open Social helped them launch the innovative crowd innovation platform Policy Kitchen in 2018.Β
A perfect fit for the foraus model
The versatility of Open Social allowed foraus to create an online community that fits their participatory policy-making methodology and allow the public to debate and contribute to Swiss foreign policy.Β
A Policy Kitchen Mobile App Policy
Kitchen is accessible as a web-bases community as well as a native mobile app, making it more accessible to a wider public.


By building the Crowd Innovation extension on top of our community software, we were able to help foraus create the perfect platform to meet their goals.
Set a challenge
This extension allows Policy Kitchen community members to create a Challenge and invite members to solve it.
Go through the Phases
Each challenge has set phases, which have a start and end date, moving the ideas through the flowand include idea creation, editing, viewing, commenting and voting.
Vote on ideas
Members have the possibility to vote on their favorite ideas, which leads to the best community ideas being selected.
The platform is focused on creating impactful publications. To empower that, Open Social added the real-time collaboration extension to the platform.
Publishing workshop results
Open Socialβs platform allows content to be easily generated by members. As a result, foraus can easily compile the ideas, suggestions and discussions from their members into publications or reports that can be presented to policy-makers.
Collaboration over Competition
Crowd Innovationallows members to collaborate with one another on ideas. This means that members have joint ownership over ideas that are suggested. This is made possible with the Realtime Collaboration extension.

How Can a Crowd Innovation Platform
Help NGOs Drive Real-world Change?
Webinar
Watch Open Social CEO and co-founder Taco Potze and foraus’ Digital Innovation Manager Eduardo BelinchΓ³n discuss how innovative technology can help organizations crowd-source ideas from an online community and drive real-world change.Β
- Learn more about online communities and crowd innovation tools
- Find out how foraus help shape foreign policy through crowd-sources ideas with Policy Kitchen
- See a demonstration of one of Open Social's most unique features
- Get the information you need to start a crowd-innovation platform for your organization
Sharing Success
Policy Kitchen Milestones
users
Given
Collected
See what other organization have achieved
with their Open Social communities
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