Rutger van Zuidam

Rutger van Zuidam is the Founder and CEO of Odyssey.org. Odyssey is an online incubator for multi-stakeholder collaboration that connects governmental, corporate, scientific and nonprofit partners with anyone that can contribute to building open source solutions for complex 21st-century challenges. All 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. Our mission is to create an interconnected, multi-stakeholder ecosystem where we discover the future by building it. Momentum is Odyssey’s online mass collaboration arena: a completely new virtual world where people meet, co-create and achieve results in a collective 3D experience, that takes people on a shared journey into the possibilities of the future. The ultimate goal is to achieve maximum results by collaborating in the most efficient way, and having a lot of fun while doing it. To enable data sovereignty for Momentum clients, Rutger co-founded non profit Foundation Cherrytwist.org, which develops a self-hosted open source Challenge Management Platform for ecosystems to manage their programs, challenges, community, grants and projects portfolio effectively. Rutger is also Faculty for Singularity University Benelux and serves Drenthe College, where 9000 students enjoy intermediate vocational education, as member of the supervisory board.