The Dinner Table Is a Technology

The most advanced collaboration technology I've ever deployed seats eight people and requires candles.

The specification is simple. Seven or eight strangers. Someone's home, not a venue. Good food. No agenda. No small-talk escape route. Run it for three hours and something happens that no software has ever reproduced for me: walls come down, conversations go places they never would at a conference, and people leave with a sense of belonging they didn't expect. At Katapult Future Fest this year we ran that specification 48 times in a single evening — 67 hosts, 524 guests — and it carried more of the festival's value than any keynote.

Formats are technologies

We reserve the word technology for things with power cords, but a social format is a technology in the strictest sense: a repeatable design that reliably converts inputs into outcomes. The dinner table is one. Open Space is another — I first stumbled onto it at Kaospilots fourteen years ago, and it's still the most reliable machine I know for turning a crowd into a set of self-organised working groups.

Open Space runs on four principles: whoever comes are the right people. Whatever happens is the only thing that could have. Whenever it starts is the right time. When it's over, it's over. That's the whole operating system — and it has seeped into everything I build, because it's less a conference method than a practice for how to be in the world right now: more participation, more leadership, from more people.

These technologies are older and more battle-tested than any app. They run without electricity. They scale fractally — every table is its own instance. And they never crash mid-session.

What our tools copied instead

Here's the tragedy of digital collaboration: when we moved work online, we copied the meeting room — the worst room humanity ever designed. One person talks, everyone else performs attention, status decides airtime. Then we added a grid of muted faces and called it innovation.

Nobody copied the table. Small, equal, hosted, purpose without pressure. A good host does what no project-management tool does: matches the right strangers, sets the container, and then gets out of the way.

Let the software set the table

This is where I've landed after years of building digital collaboration systems: the technology's job is not to host the conversation. It's to set the table and disappear. At Katapult, AI matched dinner guests, spun up the group chats, handled the logistics — thousands of small tasks — precisely so that at sunset, a human could open a door, and eight strangers could do the one thing machines can't.

So before you buy another tool for your team or your community, try the older technology first. Who are the eight people you should be cooking for?