Blick in den Maschinenraum - roadbeat at Munich Creative Business Week 2026

What comes after the algorithm? On May 8, 2026, roadbeat opens the engine room at the RUFFINIHAUS CreativeHub in Munich as part of Munich Creative Business Week (MCBW).

The event - "roadbeat: Designing the Social Web We Deserve" - is part workshop, part live demo, part open discussion. And it's free.

What this event is about

Today's platforms keep people addicted, extract their data, squeeze content into shapeless "posts," harvest it for AI training without consent, and charge publishers to reach the audience they built. Privacy is structurally impossible. Even federated alternatives like Mastodon do not solve the core design problem: when everything is a post, it is impossible to find anything precisely.

roadbeat designs different rules:

• Structured content types - 50+ schemas with precise metadata instead of one-size-fits-all posts. Each content type - event, recipe, job offer, learning material - has its own schema, form, and card layout. This enables precise search, meaningful filters, and views that match the content.
• Goal-driven discovery - Users define goals across time horizons (life, year, month, week, day) and receive precisely matched content. Every result transparently explains why it appears. The opposite of dark UX.
• Decentralized publisher infrastructure - Publishers host their own content on self-hosted Studio nodes. No platform can deplatform them. European hosting, GDPR by design, open source.

Live demo: Schema Registry, Studio CMS, and Discovery Nodes

Founder Jens Hoppe will demo the roadbeat architecture live - the three core components that make structured, goal-driven content discovery possible:

• The Schema Registry - the central repository of content type definitions that the entire network shares
• The Studio CMS - a self-hosted headless CMS where publishers create, manage, and serve structured content
• The Discovery Nodes - federated search and matching nodes that connect users' goals to publishers' content

You'll see how a content type is designed, how a publisher creates structured content, and how a user's goal matches precisely to that content - all transparent, all inspectable, all open source.

Open discussion: Can European platforms challenge Big Tech?

After the demo, we'll open the floor for discussion. The questions we want to explore together:

• How should content types and their layouts be designed? What makes a schema useful?
• Can a European platform built on transparency and user control compete with platforms optimized for addiction?
• What does "digital sovereignty" actually mean in practice - for publishers, for users, for communities?
• What role does design play in building ethical technology?

Who should attend

This event is for designers, developers, social web enthusiasts, publishers, journalists, and anyone who believes the social web can be designed better. No prior knowledge of roadbeat is required - just curiosity and the belief that we deserve better than what we have.

Practical details

• Date: May 8, 2026
• Venue: RUFFINIHAUS CreativeHub, Sendlinger Straße 1, 80331 München
• Language: German
• Price: Free (registration required)
• Registration: Register on Eventbrite
• MCBW Event Code: 767
• Barrier-free: Yes

Munich Creative Business Week is one of Germany's most important design festivals, with over 200 events across the city. roadbeat's participation is a statement: platform design is design. The choices we make about how content is structured, discovered, and presented are design choices with real consequences for society.

We hope to see you there.

- Jens Hoppe, Founder