Team size

4

Please explain how your project meets the round-specific eligibility criteria.

Criteria 1: All four members of our team (Janine, Gary, Timour, and Vjera) were organizers of past Zuzalu events, so we have each been at Zuzalu for longer than a week. Criteria 2: We are building villages with a focus on open tech, science, health, and social innovation. We will gather people from diverse fields such as Crypto, ZK, Health & Biotech, Longevity, AI, Philosophy, Public Goods, and Governance, so we are confident that we will create events that fit within the ethos and interest areas of the Zuzalu community.

How do you measure the impact of your project? Please provide examples and/or standard metrics.

We will measure impact in four key areas:

1. Helping to grow the movement: We aim to continue to create high-quality popup village experiences that inspire people to host their own. We will measure this with metrics like the number of attendees (aiming for 1000+ in 2024), NPS Review Scores (Aiming for over 4.8/5), and how many people go on to start their own similar projects.

2. Local Impact: We have a goal to drive real world impact through our activations. For example, for the event in Southeast Asia, we will be doing outreach work and getting local communities engaging with crypto products. We will use metrics like “Number of new people with an ENS domain” to track the efficacy of this initiative. We have a related goal of encouraging IRL applications of crypto, with products like Daimo and ZuPass.

3. Accelerating resident impact and incubating projects: Our gatherings are perfectly designed for collaboration and growth. We want to empower attendees to do their most impactful work by helping them incubate projects within the community. We will measure this with metrics like the number of open-source projects that we see developed or meaningfully grown over people’s time in Edge City.

4. Advancing governance and community models: We aim to demonstrate new models of community living. Innovation villages are IRL labs for new decision-making and organizational models, allowing us to try innovative governance and community designs that align with the development of technology and infrastructure. We will measure this with metrics like the number of times attendees engage in novel governance models at each village and metrics on individual health outcomes.

Ultimately, we will measure our impact based on the real-world tangible impact that our community members and their projects will have. To do so, we will continue to foster a culture of open source and public goods innovation.

How is this valuable to the Zuzalu community?

It is extremely important to us that the Zuzalu movement and community continue to flourish. We will use the funds we raise here to actively support partnerships with other popup village communities.

We also hope that by continuing to organize high-quality events, we can help to drive the movement forward, set an example of how these villages work, and encourage others to build their own. We are committed to openly sharing everything we learn.

We are also excited to continue to cultivate an ecosystem of Digital Public Goods that can be built at our events and used by all communities. Likewise, we are excited to experiment with the learnings and products that are made at our sister events and help to iterate on them.

Total Prior Funding for the project in USD (N/A in case of no funding)

N/A

Which of the following funding sources do you have? Check all that apply

None

Please describe the progress of your project? (note: new projects are also welcome)

We have several specific events planned for 2024, and this funding will help us start to put down deposits to execute them. We’ll start the year with a small launch event at ETH Denver, but our primary focus will be on two long-term experiences:

• A one-month popup village in the Bay Area in June. This event will help us expose top builders and funders in the SF tech scenes to our experiences. We want the ~150 hundred full-time residents (as well as the many visitors) to have an incredible experience and leave inspired to help build the movement as it grows.

• A 6-8 week popup village in the fall in South East Asia. The goal is to bring together several hundred people for another long-term event as part of the road to DevCon 2024. We want to create an environment for global innovators to come together and explore multidisciplinary and multicultural collaboration. This event will be familiar in style and structure to many who have been to Zuzalu before but with an even greater emphasis on health and making it accessible to folks with children.

The funding from the QF round will go directly towards organizing these pop-up villages. In particular, we will need to put down deposits on large elements like venues soon.

Which Zuzalu events have you attended for at least a week?

Zuzalu Montenegro and ZuConnect

Profiles or socials of other main team members publicly associated with the project (N/A for solo founders):

https://twitter.com/JanineLeger https://twitter.com/garysheng https://twitter.com/timourxyz https://www.linkedin.com/in/vjera-kalezic-622077187

Where will the “Zuzalu event”: roughly, a long-duration in-person gathering whose goal is to experiment with open frontier digital and social technologies

As mentioned above, our main Zuzalu-style events this year will be in June in the Bay Area, and then in the fall in Southeast Asia. Our programming will be super aligned with open frontier digital and social tech.