Edge Esmeralda

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= "Edge City is an IRL experimentation lab for new ideas, tech, culture, and organizations, all dedicated to accelerating human flourishing." [1]


Description

Jonathan Hillis:

"Most recently, I attended another Zuzalu spin-off called Edge Esmeralda, which is still happening as I write this in Healdsburg, CA (June 2024). EE is popup village designed to help seed a nearby permanent village called Esmeralda, the Chautauqua of the West. It has been my favorite popup village event so far for a few reasons: location, co-creation, and family-friendliness.

Healdsburg is a charming town of 11,000 people an hour north of San Francisco. While California is a bit more expensive and less globally accessible than other locations, it was also a short drive for the high density of strong builders in the Bay Area. The town itself was the right size to make most of the venues walkable/bikeable and had a great town square at the center for people to casually meet up. The organizers brought in a couple hundred Burning Man bikes, which helped make it easy to get around and added to the vibe.

Edge Esmeralda was spread across a dozen or so hotels, coworking spaces, and other venues to host events. The range of spaces made it easy to cowork during the day and participate in abundant programming on nights and weekends. Co-creation was highly encouraged, and they made it easy for anyone to add events to the shared calendar, which allowed people to host constant impromptu workshops, panels, and discussions.

While all of the popup village events I've attended have had elements of co-creation, it's great to see how much the technology behind these events has made this easier. Zuzalu was bootstrapped from scratch, and built infra like Zupass (their event ticketing system) onsite during the event. It was still a clunky early prototype—but now, a year later, it's a much more user friendly app. Similarly, Social Layer (which also came out of the Zuzalu ecosystem) made the shared calendar much more accessible and useable than past events, which led to more co-creation.

Edge Esmeralda was the first explicitly family-friendly popup village. It takes a village to raise kids, and popup villages are a natural fit for families. Every night at community dinner, there was a kids table full of markers, playdoh, and toys. Cabin hosted some gatherings for families in the park. There were activities and camps for kids of various ages. That said, there's lots of room for future popup villages to become even more family friendly, particularly with shared childcare."

(https://words.jonhillis.com/popup-villages/)


More information

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