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 AI festival team (Claude Code)

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
• — 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