Programming philosophy for Edge City Lanna
And how you can get involved in co-creating the experience
Hey folks! We’re excited to kick off the Edge City Lanna blog. We’re less than 10 weeks away and applications are live (if you haven’t, apply asap!). We’ll share writeups about ticketing and accommodation next week, but for now, check out our programming philosophy and how you can get involved.
TLDR:
Edge City Lanna will be like a multi-generational campus with a focus on emergence, collaboration, and diversity of frontier disciplines.
We will continue to focus on our five core themes: Real-World Crypto, Human Organization, AI, Hard Tech, and Health, Bio & Longevity.
If you want to get involved in running a program, which can range from a one-day unconference to a month-long residency, we’d love to hear from you. Let us know here!
Overview
Edge City Lanna is a pop-up village, akin to a temporary multi-generational campus, taking place Oct 10 — Nov 10, 2024 in beautiful Chiang Mai, Thailand. It will host 250 full-time participants for a month of deep work and dynamic programming with 100s of visitors throughout the month. We’ll gather a group of folks who are curious, kind, and high-agency. It’s going to be an incredible month.
For some of our attendees, this will be an opportunity to create programming to share with others, which can be an incredibly rewarding experience. We’ll share details about how to do this further in the post. But first, here is an overview of our design principles:
A focus on emergence rather than central planning. We see our job as creating the conditions for you, the participants, to engage and build awesome things on top of the structure we provide. We are leaning much more towards ‘bazaar’ rather than ‘cathedral.’
Collaboration rather than consumption: the extended format of this popup village means that you have time to build meaningful relationships with potential collaborators and go deep into your current or new projects. We hope you’ll come out of your time at Edge City Lanna having created something real, whether it’s a hardware prototype, a research paper, a piece of music, or a new company.
A mix of public-facing and in-depth programming: most programming will be open to everyone at Edge City Lanna, but some groups will choose to have some in-depth focused time that will have closed doors. If they choose to do this, they will be required to have an application for anyone to apply to join, and plenty of public-facing programming as well.
Focus on deep work: we want this to be the most productive month of our attendees’ lives. We celebrate JOMO (joy of missing out).
Diversity of disciplines: We believe that multidisciplinary collaboration is important in developing new insights across fields. Indeed, many of the most important innovations came from breakthroughs that combined diverse fields of knowledge. One of our goals is to be a place for this type of knowledge exchange, even if you’re at Edge City Lanna to go deep in one field.
We are continuing the overarching themes that we’ve developed in past events, like Edge Esmeralda, and we are excited to integrate leaders in these fields from a new part of the world. Elements of each theme will be spread throughout the month to encourage learning and collaboration between experts in different fields.
How you can get involved in programming
Have you always wanted to gather people around a particular topic to explore it further and share your insights with others? We are excited to make it as easy as possible for you to create that vision.
Running a program at Edge City Lanna offers a unique opportunity to share your expertise with a curious community of builders, gather experts from your field in a Schelling point, and be the person who invites others to an unforgettable event.
Programs are diverse — they can range from month-long residencies that go deep on specific projects to a weekend unconference focused on a particular theme. You can choose what fits you best.
If running a full program yourself sounds too intense but you want to volunteer to support others in their programs, we are always looking for support.
If this sounds exciting to you, please follow the instructions here!
Potential program focuses that we’d love to see:
Programs that activate builder communities from Southeast Asia (developers, startup builders etc.)
Programs focused on active experiments (e.g. RadicalxChange’s Edges experiment or the Concept Clinic at Edge Esmeralda)
Programs focused on real-world applications of frontier tech (e.g. the Solar A-Frame’s at Edge Esmeralda)
Programs focused on local impact that will last beyond the popup village event (e.g., setting up an accelerator, working on local refugee support, etc.)
And many more that we haven’t thought of!
If you want, you can even run a program that just creates space for deep work every day! Sometimes the best programming is no programming, and if you have an idea about how to make the experience of cohabitating great for others, we’d love to hear it.
For those of you who want to organize individual sessions or community hangs when we’re all in Chiang Mai, we love that, and we’ll share more details about how you can add your sessions to the shared calendar closer to the event!
It really takes a village to build a popup village, and we are incredibly excited to see what new insights, projects, and connections emerge from Edge City Lanna. We’re excited to experiment with both learning in parallel as well as our traditional learning in series. With everyone’s engagement, Edge City Lanna will foster a vibrant and collaborative learning community that promotes continuous growth, diversity of thought, and mutual support among its members. We know from experience how magical the serendipity of these events can be, so we encourage you to get involved!
See you soon!
Edge City team ☀️