Momentum is Odyssey’s online mass collaboration arena: a completely new virtual world where connections, partnerships and valuable solutions are built. This arena will be used to cocreate solutions for complex 21st century challenges, and opens for the first time during its online 49 hour public event, where 2.000 participants from all over the world will join. At this event, an immersive 3D experience is combined with a game and meeting design that is completely focused on collaboration.

Odyssey premiered Momentum on November 1315, 2020, with its unique hackathon event experience as part of the Odyssey incubation program for multistakeholder collaboration.

https://odyssey.org

More than 2.000 participants and 105 selected teams have worked together to build solutions for 21 challenges. These challenges are lead by corporations, governments, and nonprofits from the US, France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands (among them: Vattenfall, KLM Cargo, the Dutch National Police, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the International Council for Environmental Law, E.On, Engie, VMware, and the Dutch Ministries of Defense and the Interior). For each challenge, five teams have been selected to prepare and cocreate with these partners and their stakeholders.

The challenges are tied directly to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, have a global societal and economic impact, and cover a variety of domains such as energy transition, acute healthcare, conflict prevention, conscious cities, critical infrastructure, logistics and supply chain, nature conservation, real estate, and digital identity. These complex problems can only be solved through mass collaboration and require a multistakeholder approach to achieve breakthrough solutions for collective progress.

Reinventing Odyssey: from offline hackathon to online mass collaboration arena

Since 2017 Odyssey has organized Europe’s largest hackathon, specifically focusing on multistakeholder challenges tied to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Thousands have already participated, and not without result. 2020, however, is different from any other year. Having 2.000 people from 50 countries work closely together for 49 hours in an old factory hall in the Dutch city of Groningen, simply wasn’t feasible. Accelerated by the necessity of the COVID19 crisis, Odyssey decided to go completely online.

It quickly became clear that in order to take the event online, existing meeting platforms wouldn’t suffice. You can’t simply ask 2.000 people to join a 49 hour Zoom, Teams or Hangouts meeting. Current event software platforms didn’t offer a solution either, as these don’t support multistakeholder collaboration processes. That is why over the past few months, Odyssey has developed its own platform, Momentum, building a completely new stack integrating Unity, Miro, Twilio, with a high performance UI layer and scalable server infrastructure. This resulted in the online mass collaboration arena, premiered with the hackathon, Nov 1315.

Odyssey’s online mass collaboration arena combines a unique gaming and meeting design that is completely focused on collaboration in a 3D experience, that will show the possibilities of the future. Through this platform, a pathway to meaningful action is facilitated between people building solutions, experts, problem owners, users, stakeholders as well as board members and investors. The ultimate goal is to achieve maximum results by collaborating in the most efficient way, and having a lot of fun while doing it.