Programming Philosophy & Preview for Edge Esmeralda 2025

What the month at Edge Esmeralda looks like

Hey folks! We’re pulling together the programming preview to help you decide what weeks to join us for Edge Esmeralda.

Note: If you’re not sure which week you can come, don’t worry — you can now buy a ticket for any week & reassign it later!

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Key takeaways

• We will center each week around one of our core four themes:

  1. May 24 - June 1 | Living Better, Living Longer: Health, Longevity, Biotech, Neurotech, and Community & Experiential Design

  2. June 1 - June 8 | Reality Reinvented: Virtual & Mixed Reality, Hard Tech, Augmented & Artificial Intelligence, and Adventure Weekend

  3. June 8 - 15 | Environments of Tomorrow: Education, Cities, Culture, Agritech, and Climate

  4. June 15 - 21 | Decentralized Technologies: Real-world Crypto, Stablecoins, Governance, Programmable Cryptography, Protocols Research, and D/ACC

• If you’re interested in hosting a session or running a program, which can range from a one-day unconference to a month-long residency, let us know!

• Don’t forget to apply and get your ticket!

Weekly Themes & Programming

Programming for each theme will be spread throughout the month to encourage learning and collaboration between experts in different fields, and each week will have a "showcase week" where it is the primary focus. Below you’ll see which themes correspond to which week, to help you get a sense of when you might be excited to come.

If you’d like to contribute to any of the weeks’ programming, please let us know.

Week 0: May 17 - 24 · Build Week

NEW: Join us prior to Edge Esmeralda’s kickoff for a week of setup, testing technology, and infrastructure that will be used during the month and be part of the pioneers shaping Edge Esmeralda.

Week 1: May 24 - June 1 · Living Better, Living Longer

Health, Longevity, Biotech, Neurotech, and Community & Experiential Design

Beyond the specific topic tracks listed above, the first week will focus on community connection moments such as the Opening Ceremony, setting the stage for the month to come.

Week 2: June 1 - June 8 · Reality Reinvented

Virtual & Mixed Reality, Hardtech, Augmented & Artificial Intelligence, and Adventure Weekend

The second week will focus on VR/AR technology and art, hard tech, and augmented and artificial intelligence that supports human flourishing. We’ll culminate the week in a weekend away in nature, similar to what we did at Camp Navarro last year.

Week 3: June 8 - 15 · Environments of Tomorrow

Education, Cities, Culture, Agritech, and Climate

The third week will focus on the future of our environment, education, institutions, culture, and cities, and how we might change these systems for the better.

Week 4: June 15 - 21 · Decentralized Technologies

Real-world Crypto: Stablecoins, Governance, Programmable Cryptography, Protocols Research, and D/ACC

We’ll end the month with an exploration of cutting edge cryptography with the world’s leading academics, while exploring the real-world applications of crypto like stablecoins and governance. We will also use this week to explore protocols research.

Additionally, we’ll host a closing ceremony and celebration to wrap up the month!

Our philosophy for Edge Esmeralda’s programming is heavily based on co-creation so the above are guidelines and may change and expand as more folks volunteer to run initiatives. In addition, the above doesn’t explicitly share about the kids programming. We will follow with that soon.

Month-Long Residencies, Experiments & Education Initiatives

We are excited to continue with residencies and experiments for Edge Esmeralda:

• Each residency will be a sub-village of 10-50 people who are focused on a particular theme, whether it’s Local LLMs, Health Tech, AR/VR Art, or DeFi.

• Experiments will largely be new products, technology, or forms of social organization that we’d love to see tested during the course of the month. An example would be testing NFC chips and a new social app using privacy preserving technology to help Edge Esmeraldans meet one another, or building a solar powered GPU.

• Education initiatives will be a new form of programming more geared toward children. This year we will include a kids outdoor adventure camp that will run and a number of kids education concepts (stay tuned for the kids programming post coming soon).

Each residency, experiment or education initiative will have its own approach, but will be integrated into the broader experience.

If you want to form your own residency or have your technology or product used, we encourage it! You can submit a proposal here.

What is Edge Esmeralda?

Edge Esmeralda is a month-long “popup village” that gathers people who believe the future can be better and are actively working to make it happen. You can think of EE as a multigenerational college campus, with gathering spaces scattered throughout a charming small town in California Wine Country.

1,300 people joined us at EE’24 last year for a month of living, learning, and collaborating. EE’25 will follow a similar format: ~250 full-time participants, with 100s of visitors each week throughout the month.

We encourage everyone to participate in some capacity, whether leading a workshop, joining the daily workouts or building a new project to test with participants. 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 Esmeralda having created something real, whether it’s a hardware prototype, a research paper, a new company, a piece of music, or becoming a healthier person.

• A mix of public-facing & intimate programming: Most programming will be open to everyone at Edge Esmeralda, but some groups will choose to have some intimate, in-depth focused time. For any track organizers who choose to do this, they will be required to have an application for anyone to apply to join, and public-facing programming as well. For example, if you’d like to run a hard tech workshop for experts building in the space, we’d encourage that as well as a 30 minute open workshop for all levels of expertise.

• 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 and activities. 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 Esmeralda to go deep in one field.

How you can get involved in programming

One of the strengths of the popup village format is that it gathers a group of people who are excited to be guinea pigs for new ideas, tools, and ways of living. A key aspect is that many of these people will be at EE for an extended period of time, generally between 1-4 weeks. We encourage you to take advantage of this enthusiastic “captive audience” in order to further your personal or professional project, meet people with shared interests, or learn a new skill.

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 you are interested in hosting a session, program, or residency at EE’25, let us know here! And if running a full program yourself sounds too intense but you want to host a workshop, or volunteer to support others in their programs, still fill in the form as we are always looking for support.

Requests for Programs

• Programs that activate builder communities (developers, startup builders, etc. like Flow’s Edge City Lanna Hackathon or Filecoin’s Hacker House)

• Programs focused on active experiments (e.g. Cursive’s app, RadicalxChange’s Edges experiment, the Concept Clinic at Edge Esmeralda)

• Programs focused on real-world applications of frontier tech (e.g. the Solar A-Frames at Edge Esmeralda)

• Hosting a yoga class or fitness workout once a week

• Programs focused on local impact that will last beyond the popup village event (e.g., supporting local non-profits, working on local housing policy, etc.)

• And many more that we haven’t thought of!

You can even run a program that just creates space for deep work, such as “Pomodoros 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 a one-off session or activity, 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 takes a village to build a popup village. With everyone’s engagement, Edge Esmeralda will foster a vibrant and collaborative 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 Esmeralda team ☀️