What We Do
Consortia are easy to announce and hard to operate. The ones that produce real outcomes share a few characteristics: a clearly bounded technical problem, a governance structure that participants actually trust, a delivery cadence with product-driven organization discipline, and a small number of people who can keep the coalition aligned without flattening it to the lowest common denominator.
We've worked across every stage of consortia development. We help clients found, structure, and run consortia — or identify and join existing ones effectively — with a focus on shipping outputs that hold up under external scrutiny.
How We Help
We help clients decide whether a consortium is the right tool in the first place, then design the governance, charter, and operating cadence that makes it work. When existing coalitions get stuck — on data access, on governance disputes, on delivery — we are often called in to help unstick them.
Representative Work
Working Paper is a small firm by design. The work below reflects what you're hiring when you hire us — engagements led at Working Paper, and the senior careers our principals brought with them.
MLCommons frontier AI reliability benchmarking. We lead product, program, and policy strategy across MLCommons' AI reliability benchmarking work. We coordinate SUT runs for the AILuminate v1.0 Jailbreak Benchmark, we draft consortium governance artifacts (Responsible Disclosure Policy, Taxonomy Maintenance Process), and we convened frontier-model labs to create new working groups and benchmarks (e.g. security and privacy).
Open-source digital health consortium, operating at national scale. We conceived and launched the Community Health Toolkit, an open-source platform for community health that brought together 15 founding partner organizations and now supports more than 170,000 frontline health workers across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The CHT has been adopted at national scale in multiple countries, and is the most widely adopted health-worker-facing software platform in Africa.
NYC MCP convening. We often organize convenings where there is an opportunity to make an impact. For example, a recent Working Paper convening on the Model Context Protocol governance, brought together MCP server developers, agent platform teams, and policy practitioners to align on the emerging norms for safe agentic infrastructure. This included experts from ICPSR, the World Bank, Google, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NORC, the NIH Genomic Data Commons, and NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics.
European Digital Media Observatory Working Group on Data Sharing. We wrote the initial strategy for, founded, and helped lead the EDMO multi-stakeholder working group that brought together civil society (Access Now, Future of Privacy Forum, GESIS), academia (University of Amsterdam, Sheffield, George Washington), and industry (Meta, Google, Twitter) to define an ethical, lawful process for research data sharing under GDPR and the DSA. We also authored position papers that informed the resulting EDMO Code of Conduct.
Blood Profiling Atlas in Cancer. We sponsored and ran Seven Bridges' involvement in the Obama administration's Cancer Moonshot, then co-chaired BloodPAC with a focus on computation and communications. We recruited members from the National Cancer Institute, Department of Defense, University of Chicago, Pfizer, Merck, and Bristol Myers Squibb — a government-industry collaboration that remains the only ongoing Cancer Moonshot program.
Research Coordination Network on Privacy Enhancing Technologies. We lead the subject-matter work for the National Science Foundation- and Department of Energy-funded Research Coordination Network on PETs, hosted at the Future of Privacy Forum. We have built and engaged a global network of PETs practitioners — industry experts, academic leaders, and global privacy regulators — to identify use cases that balance privacy and utility through evidence-based approaches.
Open Commons Consortium. We sit on the advisory board of the Open Commons Consortium, advising on data sharing, privacy, governance, and social science best practices in support of Gen3, OCC's open-source platform for privacy-preserved analysis and regulatory compliance.
Cross-organization research coalitions. We established a thriving open-science network around Medic's open-source projects and launched Medic Labs to incubate breakthroughs in precision public health, partnering with academic and implementing organizations across multiple continents.