What it was.
Davos’s magic is the proximity. Davos’s failure mode is the bouncer at every door. The House of Collaboration is the deliberate counter-proposal: a week of programming aligned with WEF dates, hosted by a coalition of cross-community organizations, where the only ticket required is a name on the list of people who actually do the work.
My remit.
Tech direction across the week. That meant: identity (a single check-in roster against four parallel community-org rosters that don’t share a database), AV (a venue that wasn’t built as one), data discipline (consent-first contact-graph for the alumni layer afterwards), and the live operational stack — Slack, Monday.com, on-floor mesh — that kept the producers and the bar staff in sync during the 200-attendee reception and the 60-person closing dinner.
How it ran.
- Reception · 200+ attendees — opening night. RSVP gated through the merged roster. Greeters had tablets on a self-hosted ServerClaw instance running a custom check-in app — no data left the venue.
- Panels · midweek — three sessions, each capped at 80. Topics chosen by the coalition: AI in civic infrastructure, the next decade of open data, philanthropy past the OKR.
- Closing dinner · 60 seats — hand-curated seating chart. The seating chart is the artifact most worth caring about; it’s the place the entire week pays off.
Why this work matters past the optics.
Most “Davos-adjacent” programming is an excuse to sell a logo placement. The House of Collaboration is the opposite — a venue where the coalition partners absorb the cost so that the room can be curated, not sold. The same discipline as WeMeshUp, applied to the one week of the year when the world’s coordination cost is at its lowest.