unDavos Summit: A brief history

The first unDavos Summit was in 2018 at the Hotel Europe. Originally called the ‘Solver Series’, the summit had around 15 panels and workshops on diverse topics such as the future of warfare, cities, next gen wealth, and more. The event also hosted a parallel event with the Global Shapers called ‘Shape the World’, giving an opportunity for the WEF Shaper community members to share their projects with an enthusiastic, engaged audience.

The event itself only happened thanks to the creativity and good spirit of wonderful folk within the community. A company had rented a large room in Hotel Europe as a night-time party venue. This unused space inspired someone to think “maybe people in the community could use it somehow”. As an aside, this was just a few days before the WEF was about to start, so “no time!”. The power of the crowd was the secret to the event, and a Google Form was set up to collect the ideas of people who would be in Davos and able to speak.

30 speakers, later, and we had people but no organizing concept. We decided to split times into 1-hour blocks, focused on a topic, and assign individuals as ‘Session Owners’ to help select speakers, and make sure people turned up!

2019 and that space had been taken… to run a week-long series of events. The trend for running conference programming, parallel to the WEF, had grown massively in number (and continues to this day). So we moved to the Ratia Center across the street - and did the same thing again.

2020 was a gap year, then Covid hit. Summer Davos in May 2022 was hard to plan, as no one back then knew if the world would be back to life. So that meant that our next Summit, the first officially titled unDavos Summit, took place Jan 2023.

The event took place in five venues in Davos Platz, including the Mountain Plaza Hotel (then called Sunstar), theWisdom House (NGO folk), and the Kulturplatz movie theater. Over 35 topics, over 150 speakers, and over 1,000 participants.

So now we prepare for 2024 - hope to see you there!

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