Daniel Model is a Swiss entrepreneur who runs the Model Group, a fourth-generation packaging and display company. He is the owner of Modelhof, the cultural and training centre in the Canton of Thurgau that hosted the conference.
The family firm was founded in 1882 in Weinfelden and now employs several thousand people across central Europe, making packaging and displays for industrial customers. Model took it over as the fourth generation and has run it alongside a second, stranger project.
In 2006, invited to address Thurgau municipal leaders on the relationship between the state and business, he used the occasion to proclaim a state of his own, later named Avalon. In 2012 he opened the Modelhof in Müllheim as its seat, and runs it as a venue for lectures, apprenticeship training and cultural events, with a programme built around the idea of a society organised by voluntary contract rather than by compulsion.
That places him among the small number of European industrialists who have taken the micronation question seriously in public, and makes the Modelhof a recurring venue for the German-speaking part of the Free Cities debate.