Katapult Future Fest

Katapult Future Fest is an impact festival bringing together founders, investors, artists, and changemakers around technology for good. The 2026 edition — “Enter the Metamorphosis” — ran May 27–29 in Amsterdam: an Investor Day and Kickoff Dinner at Tolhuistuin, then two festival days at Ruigoord, an artist village on the city’s edge. Over 1,000 attendees registered (874 checked in on site), 56% of them international, for Katapult’s first festival outside Oslo in seven years.

Thrivbe held the Community Participation & Activation lead and built the festival’s digital layer — a rare combination: the same team that wrote the software also stood in the field making the community work.

The website

The main site at katapultfuturefest.com — program, speakers, tickets — is a fast single-page application, vibe-coded with AI pair-programming and shipped on Vercel. Iteration speed was the point: festival content changes daily in the final weeks, and the site kept up.

The conference app

app.katapultfuturefest.com is a progressive web app (React + Supabase) attendees used throughout the festival: schedules, speaker profiles, and AI-powered matchmaking — 15,199 precomputed introductions from 650 embedded profiles, scored on six compatibility factors. 679 attendees registered in the app and saved 6,271 sessions; live talks were transcribed and summarized in near real time (“AI weaving”), feeding audience reflections back into the room. Offline-first with push notifications, because festival WiFi is what it is.

The backend

One pipeline powered everything: Notion as the master database for speakers, sessions, volunteers, dinners, and guests → nightly serverless syncs → Supabase serving the app. An internal operations dashboard gave the team a live view across all of it. Push complexity into deterministic pipelines; let humans make decisions.

An agentic operating system for events

The festival ran on a three-layer architecture first prototyped at unDavos, here fully realized: directives (living operational blueprints in plain Markdown), an AI orchestration layer that routes work and handles exceptions, and deterministic execution scripts that talk to the APIs.

On top of it, the festival was co-run with a roster of Claude Code agents — community weaver, program architect, volunteer coordinator, activation producer, Notion engineer — each owning a workstream with its own skills and directives. One production example: the dinner-WhatsApp skill created 25+ fully configured community-dinner groups end to end — naming, descriptions, avatars, host and guest invitations — work that would otherwise have consumed days of coordinator time.

Community coordination & organising

Thrivbe led community participation festival-wide: reactivating the 2024 host network (~40 WhatsApp groups, ~400 people), recruiting and matching dinner hosts, and running the community-led program — curated unconference meetups on the main stages plus a spontaneous Open Space format where attendees pitched their own sessions.

Community dinners

The festival’s signature evening: 48 intimate dinners across Amsterdam — 67 hosts welcoming 524 guests, matched deliberately — plus parallel dinners hosted by the Ruigoord artist community on site. Every dinner had its own WhatsApp group, a volunteer for logistics, and shuttle transport timed from the festival grounds. Strangers at sunset, collaborators by midnight.

59 volunteers, 120+ shifts

From 85 applicants, a 59-strong volunteer corps covered registration, stage coordination, thematic “stage weaving,” the welcome desk, and unconference support across 120+ shifts over three days — organized in rotation groups so everyone worked two days and experienced the festival on their third. Recruitment, scheduling, onboarding, and day-of reserve coverage for no-shows were all part of the system Thrivbe designed.

Activations

The participatory layer that makes a festival feel alive: a glitter station, sound baths, textile explorations, the Ocean Lounge with Katapult Ocean, a Systemic Investing Sandbox, and a startup showcase under the stretch tent — sourced, budgeted, mapped into the venue, and wired for power, light, and weather.

Project management

Everything ran on a directives-as-code model: every workstream (dinners, volunteers, activations) had a living operational blueprint in Markdown, executed through Notion master databases, Slack channel workflows, and Python automation scripts — with an Obsidian knowledge vault mapping people, venues, themes, and decisions. The result: a festival of this complexity, coordinated by a small team that always knew where the truth lived.

What we built

• — Main festival website (katapultfuturefest.com)
• — Conference app with AI matchmaking and live session AI (app.katapultfuturefest.com)
• — Notion → Supabase data backbone + internal ops dashboard
• — Agentic operating system (directives → AI orchestration → deterministic execution)
• — AI agent team for dinner, volunteer, and program operations
• — 48 community dinners (67 hosts, 524 guests) + host network reactivation
• — 59-volunteer program across 120+ shifts
• — Activations program and unconference formats

Relevant services

Phygital Events and Facilitation · AI Digital Teammates