Innosuisse projectPublished on 04.10.2022

Swiss Digital Ethics Compass


Developing digitization initiatives necessitate a balanced approach to ethics.
Several frameworks have been adopted to clarify the various challenges in digital contexts.
An integrated approach is required to meet the demand for sustainable digitalization and address the growing number of challenges in handling data and related components.


Our framework is set out to address these challenges from data, machine learning and artificial intelligence that are connected to concerns of justice, sustainability and climate change and to implement a digital ethic radar as a user interface. By means of our digital ethics compass, a conceptual framework, our vision is to develop digitalization standards that connects law and regulations, ethics and justice and environmental sustainability. Our framework includes boundary conditions of sustainable development, social thresholds of justice and planetary boundaries.
It incorporates frameworks and standards as value-based engineering and IEEE.


The goal is to assess digital services on their sustainability and ethics. Thereby, we focus on computational ethics, which is intended to make values measurable and calculable. Collaboration between ethical research, computer science and business practice are needed to define conditions of justice as evaluation standards for digital services and maturity models. Ethics contributes by defining norms used as evaluation standards and computer sciences are required to determine criteria and algorithms to assess digital services. The project will develop artifacts as ethical heath maps and linguistic summaries as minimum viable products with feedback loops with an agile methodology. Part of testing the artifacts is Swiss Post’s operationalization within their use cases to get constant and early feedback from users and concerning the expected business value of the framework implementation will impact services to operationalize in different projects to create an added value.