Beyond the form Hackathon

The form should bend to the person

Over a typical adult lifetime, we spend roughly 5 to 6 months — about 3,600 to 4,000 hours — filling in forms, managing personal paperwork, and navigating bureaucracy. Months of one short life, handed over to admin.

Last week, we brought an SF-style hackathon to Zürich to do something about it.

It was called Beyond the Form, and the premise was simple: the way we communicate with governments and large institutions is broken, and AI might finally be the thing that fixes it.

Here's the thing about a form. It's an interface — the interface between a person and an institution. And it's designed entirely around the institution's needs. It asks the same questions over and over. It speaks a language nobody actually speaks. It doesn't care that you've written your address a thousand times before. When you're calm and organised, it's tedious. When you're grieving or exhausted, it's cruel.

That's not an abstract concern for us. At EverSettled, we help families settle a loved one's estate — a process that still takes around 18 months, costs tens of thousands, and can demand hundreds of hours of unpaid administrative work, usually from someone in the middle of the worst year of their life. Most of that work is forms.

So we gave the teams one question to chew on: instead of the person bending to the form, could the form bend to the person?

Last Thursday, a room of people at ETH Zürich gave up their evening to figure it out. Four hours, teams of two to four, pizza, and a lot of AI credits. The talent was insane — and the outcomes continued a pattern we keep seeing at these events: faster execution, sharper design, and, most importantly, genuinely original ideas.

What struck me most wasn't any single prototype. It was how quickly people stopped treating the form as a fixed thing. Once you accept that a form is really just a data structure — and that a conversation, a voice note, or a photo of a letter could fill it — the whole ritual starts to look optional.

Two projects captured that especially well.

Once, from Alper M. Sametoglu and his team, took first place. It's a browser extension with a semantic memory: you give it your facts once, in plain language, and it reads, understands, and fills any complex form or PDF — including a US estate tax return. You just review. Forms meet their match. You fill it once.

ProxyForm, from Ryan Fuchs and his team, came second. It's a conversational agent you talk to over WhatsApp. Tell it who you are once, and it reuses that across every form, portal and institution — filling applications, submitting them, and chasing down the missing documents until everything's done. Say it once. We'll say it everywhere.

Two teams, from two directions, arriving at the same instinct: say it once, and never again.

Thank you to the ETH Student Project House for hosting, to our judges — Arum Kempster, Jacob Effenberger, Anis Belmokhtar, Darijan Ducic, Jaka Bavdek and Tobias Budig — for giving their evening to score the room, and above all to everyone who showed up to spend a Thursday on one of the least glamorous, most quietly important problems there is.

The best interface for bureaucracy is no interface at all.