Why a network of organisations should own its platform

Most collaboration software is built for one organisation. Many of the networks we work with are something else: member states, national administrations, competing airlines, consortium partners. They have to work together, but they will never sit in one organisation, or one hierarchy. That was the starting point of the opening keynote at the Open Social Summit '26 in Rotterdam.

Collaboration across organisations runs on trust

When a platform is shared by many organisations, people need to know who they are dealing with, who can see what, and which document is the approved version. When those rules are visible, decisions move faster and are easier to accept. When they are not, work drifts back to email, spreadsheets and bilateral calls.

WE BUILD shows what this looks like at scale. More than 200 organisations, from startups to large companies, are building Europe's digital business wallet together, and they need to share work in progress without losing their intellectual property. Their requirements for a platform included document collaboration, access control and one more line: no US technology.

Where data is stored, and whose law reaches it

That last requirement reflects a shift in how organisations think about sovereignty. For years the question was where data is hosted. The more useful question is who can compel access to it. In June 2025, Microsoft France told the French Senate it could not guarantee that French data would never be handed to US authorities. A European region of a provider headquartered elsewhere remains subject to that provider's jurisdiction.

When WE BUILD asked, we could not yet answer yes for every part of our own stack. Like most European software companies, we used SendGrid for email and Cloudflare at the edge. Both are being replaced this year, and our CTO's talk describes how.

Work becomes memory

Sovereign hosting is the starting point. What makes a network valuable over time is what its work leaves behind: approved documents, decisions and lessons learned. That record outlives staff rotations and project cycles, and AI is making it searchable and usable in new ways.

AI also changes who is active on a platform. A growing share of the work will be done by assistants and agents acting for someone. As Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, put it: AI lowers the cost of creation, not the cost of trust. Drafting, translating and summarising get cheaper. Deciding which version is approved, who may see it and where an answer came from still needs clear rules, and the platform is where those rules live.

Memory calls for ownership

Once a network's memory is its main asset, three questions become strategic: where it lives, who and which AI can reach it, and how the network could move if it had to. A platform meant to be trusted should pass that last test. An export is a start, but the real question is whether another provider could keep the platform running. That depends on open standards such as SAML, OIDC and SCIM, and on being able to run with a provider of your choice or on your own infrastructure. The European Commission runs its community platform on its own infrastructure, and GovTech Deutschland runs Open Social on its own cloud.

We are working through that test with a client that asked how it would move, and we will share what we learn.

What we committed to

1. Your rules. Permissions on your platform that you can review and verify.
2. Your data, your exit. A documented and tested route to move your platform.
3. Your AI choices. Control over whether AI is on, what content it can see and which provider it uses.

See it for yourself

If you run a network of organisations and want to see how this works in practice, request a demo.