Futurefield
Trials in days, not in months.
Futurefield is the first prototype of Quantum Futures: a tool that lets public authorities prepare technology trials in days rather than months — legally sound, technically specified, and open source.
Authorities that want to trial new technology rarely fail because of the technology. They fail on rules that are too restrictive or too unclear, and on the question of which technologies are worth testing at all. There is also no shared knowledge base across ministries: every authority starts from zero, and what one trial establishes rarely carries into the next. The Bundeserprobungsgesetz will allow administrations to trial digital and simplified procedures across departmental lines, but which clause applies to which project, and how a pilot becomes evidence for a nationwide rollout, remain open questions. Futurefield closes this gap, taking an authority from the intention to trial a new technology to a plan it can actually submit.
Who we are
Futurefield is developed by the Quantum Social Lab team behind Quantum Futures at the TUM Think Tank, which since 2022 has worked at the intersection of emerging technologies, governance and society. Quantum Futures gives public authorities and companies access to the research expertise they need to govern emerging technologies; Futurefield is its first prototype, turning part of that expertise into a tool any authority can use. The project has been selected for the German Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation's (SPRIND) mission "Deutschland, was geht?", and the team will develop and pilot it over the coming months.
The Team
Prof. Dr. Urs Gasser (PI) – Advisor Governance
Fabienne Marco – Project Lead & Technical Lead
Gabriela Boechat – Head of Public Sector Innovation
Philip Pfaller – Innovation Manager
Prof. Dr. Boris Paal – Advisor Legal Tech
Prof. Dr. Georg Groh – Advisor NLP & AI
What we do
Futurefield answers both halves of the question every trial project faces. An authority describes its project on the platform and receives the applicable experimentation clause with permissible deviations, safeguards and a review-ready Erprobungsplan, together with a matching technical test design including protocols and infrastructure recommendations. Authorities can enter from either side: with a technology they want to trial, or with a problem for which a suitable technology still has to be identified. Because every project is prepared and documented in the same way, decisions become comparable across authorities and departments for the first time, and each documented trial adds to a shared evidence base rather than disappearing into a single case file. Futurefield is not meant to stand alone. The team is working towards integrating it into Quantum Futures, a platform tailor-made for emerging-technology governance, and is taking that idea into the Validate stage of Catalyst GER this autumn — the nationwide pilot programme, in which TUM participates, that supports researchers in the social sciences and humanities in bringing their work into practice.
How we do it
Two curated knowledge bases underpin the tool: a legally validated, machine-readable representation of the general experimentation clause and the experimentation clauses of sector-specific laws, and a catalogue of emerging technologies with maturity levels, fields of application and testing requirements. An AI assistant works strictly over the curated legal database, with every statement traced to its underlying norm, so that each recommendation can be checked rather than taken on trust. A technical configurator then specifies the test environment itself, from simulation environments and cloud access to real hardware through to field-test setups. The core will be open source, published on openCoDE.de and freely usable by the public sector, with the ongoing legal curation sustainably financed through subscriptions.
