Zuzalu Community Newsletter | July 2024 Edition

Our newsletter is one year old today! And that means we're already halfway through 2024. 🤯

A "Summer of Spin-Offs" is in full swing and many of us keep meeting for iterations of our Zuzalu experiment, so I'm excited to share about a number of them in this edition. Please reach out if you'd like to share about your project for next month's newsletter! Welcome to the July 2024 Edition of the Zuzalu newsletter, where you'll read about recent and upcoming Zu-events, Zuzalu.city tech updates, Zuzagora trending topics, community accomplishments and reflections, and our on-going list of upcoming events.

I. Summer of Spin-Offs

AyaHQ

The team at AyaHQ has successfully run 3 global experiences all in June:

1. Nairobi with WFP
2. muAccra, a 2-weeks residency for builders
3. DFS Labs Stellar Surge a day workshop for early stage builders and over 16+ ideas pitched. Since Zuzalu, AyaHQ has led the building of EthJos, EthAbuja, Ayahub for physical activations.

MuseMatrix Happy to share that MuseMatrix has launched its DeSci Fellowship (thanks to Zuzalu GC round) 🎉. The pic shows our peer-to-peer learning sessions where scientists teach developers and vice versa. Most scientists had no exposure to web3 but are now fully DeSci-pilled! They will collaborate on an ambitious project to solve a core scientific problem. Stay tuned for the reveal! 👀 PS: We're launching cohorts in LATAM and Africa (reach out if you know someone interested!) and will be bringing Fellows to Georgia, hope to see you there!

Edge Esmeralda

Edge Esmeralda is officially wrapped up! It was an amazing time --- thank you to everyone in the Zuzalu community who came and participated. We will share a more detailed wrap up soon, but suffice to say that it was a wonderful, weird mind-expanding, relationship-building, and fun month ☀️ Some fun stats, courtesy of Social Layer: we had 551 sessions on the calendar throughout the month (average of 18 per day), with 167 unique hosts or cohosts, out of the 1,000 or so people who came. It was so cool to see emergent programming really working. One of the most gratifying things was the integration with the local community in the town of Healdsburg. One of the local reporters wrote a thoughtful piece about it, which you can read here, where she wrote: "Edge Esmeralda was one of the weirdest, wildest, most ambitious, most unexpected --- and most fun --- things I've ever watched unfold in Healdsburg." We'll have more info to come after we have a moment to retro everything, including many of our learnings from the month, and our plans for Thailand!

*EthCC Zuzalu Reunion*

We're hosting a Zuzalu Reunion during ETHCC Week on July 10th, 2024! We welcome every Zuzalian to come hang out and catch up in-person at ZuKastle. Please RSVP via https://lu.ma/0jfyqzjn to give us a sense of who's coming 🙂 In the spirit of co-creation: if you're a ZuVillage Organizer, we invite you to join as a speaker to talk about your past or upcoming events! Please reach out to Nicole (sunjcole@gmail.com) with presentation slides by July 4th, 2024 @ 11:59pm EST. You are welcome to join in-person on stage, or virtually via a pre-recorded video / written update. Please keep your presentation to 3 minutes.

We will also be hosting a masquerade ball on the 12th. Register here to attend! lu.ma/dog2bqss

ZuVillage Georgia In just a few weeks, ZuVillage Georgia will kick-off our six week iteration of the Zuzalu experiment, where we seek to lay the foundations for a transnational techno-optimist cypherpunk network by exploring our themes and building aligned technologies. We've been working hard to bring our understanding of the "essence" of Zuzalu to Georgia while pushing the movement forward with vision and ambition. Also, we've added Pre-Orientation sessions and a first week dedicated to rationality, metarationality, sense-making, and cognitive sovereignty to help us all engage, discuss, and disagree with each other on these complex topics in productive ways. (Throwback to Anna's "based" from ZuConnect.)

You can read and critique our mission statement here, and if you'd like one of our dwindling resident slots, be sure to apply ASAP!

ZuBled This September, ZuBled brings the Zuzalu community to the Julian Alps for a month-long gathering in Bled, Slovenia. Set against the backdrop of pristine lakes and mountains, ZuBled focuses on advancing key areas of innovation: longevity and health, decentralized science, real-world crypto applications, network states, AI, and space tech. The unique Alpine setting serves as both inspiration and testing ground, with SubWork coworking hub just steps away from Lake Bled. ZuBled offers a perfect blend of focused work sessions, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and nature-inspired thinking. Join 70 long-term residents and 100 short-term visitors in shaping the future of technology and society in one of Europe's most beautiful locations. To keep you posted, register for ZuBled on Luma.

*ZuIndia*

Zu-India, scheduled for November to mid-December 2024 (tentative) in Bangalore-India, is an experimental pop-up village inspired by Zuzalu. It aims to tackle India's core challenges by avoiding long-term undesirable equilibrium states. The initiative focuses on three fundamental challenges: talent, ambition, and capital. Zu-India seeks to cultivate truth-seeking, encourage critical thinking, and foster a culture of ambition and defensive risk-taking. Zu-India will experiment with governance models to address systemic challenges in India. It aims to drive both local and global problem-solving, promoting innovation through cross-pollination among different fields of technology, art, and culture.

For updates on Zu-India please join: https://t.me/+WEGHdd6xLHBlYTA1 If you are interested to contribute to Zu-India : Please DM @yeshdoteth on TG.

4Seas 4Seas community is creating a brand new crypto nomad village---4Seas Ninnman---on Nimman Road in Chiang Mai, Thailand. This innovative project aims to provide semi-permanent infrastructure for crypto nomads, including co-working spaces, co-living areas, studio space, small and medium-sized public event venues, and rentable commercial units. Our goal is to create a vibrant environment where crypto enthusiasts and digital nomads can work, live, and interact.

We are thrilled to collaborate with multiple partners to drive the development of this project. This includes working with Invisible Garden to build a "pop-up city" themed around ZK technology, as well as welcoming the offline settlement of the ETHPanda virtual community. Furthermore, we look forward to more crypto gatherings and communities joining 4Seas, further enriching this ecosystem. As part of the project, 4Seas is planning to establish a semi-permanent crypto library. By introducing unpublished materials and literature that embody crypto culture and spirit, we hope to provide a unique space for cultural exchange between crypto nomads and local residents in Chiang Mai. This library will become a center for knowledge sharing and intellectual discourse, fostering growth and innovation within the crypto community.

4Seas' core values support diverse development and transformative practices based on the crypto spirit. We encourage members to think collaboratively, discuss, and make decisions together, jointly committed to building a sustainable crypto nomad startup society with positive externalities. In this post-nation-state era, we actively explore solutions for digital personal sovereignty and network state citizenship for future world citizens. Through these efforts, we hope to open up new possibilities for social organization and civil rights in the digital age.

II. Zuzalu.City

**Moving from Guilded to Element ** Since all Guilded accounts will require a Roblox account connection to maintain access from July 15th, ZuCity is transitioning our collaboration space from Guilded to Element. Our Status community is still in beta testing, but if you're curious and want to check it out, feel free to join there, too. For now, we'll be settling into Element for a smoother experience. Join us on Element to continue being part of our vibrant community. Thanks for rolling with us through this transition! **Current Features for Zucity MVP **

1. NFT Tickets • Building with Scrollpass: Zuzalu.city is leveraging Scrollpass to build and integrate NFT tickets, offering a secure and verifiable method for event access.
2. Funding • Integration with LottoPGF: The platform is integrating LottoPGF that funds public goods via lottery. This feature will iterate from MVP to design and build the funding distribution mechanism which aims to rationalize resource distribution within the Zuzalu ecosystem, ensuring efficient and transparent allocation of funds. More Features are on the way! If you are interested in building Zuzalu.city with your expertise and interests, click Element to join the operation and shape the software together. • Follow our X (@Zuzalu_city), farcaster(@zuzalucity) and stay tuned with Zuzalu Townhall and Newsletter for more updates.

• Join the Zuzalu Builder Space on Element. • Join our bi-weekly software meetings to introduce yourself and get involved -- our next meeting is next Thursday! We're here to support Zuvillage events every step of the way. If you have any questions or need assistance for zuzalu.city, feel free to contact Veronica(TG:@hxatk) & Kelly(TG:@Kelly_xzw), or join Zuzalu Software's Element server for more in-time support.

III. Zuzagora** **

Top three posts on Zuzagora today: Seeking Community Input: Allocation Strategy for Zuzalu's Upcoming Q2 Grant Round - ongoing discussion about the Q2 grant round Zuzalu 2024 proposal: decentralize it - Vitalik's original proposal and the ongoing discussion about the 2024 decentralization of Zuzalu events & tech Anonymous Concerns about QF on Gitcoin - An anonymous thread to discuss concerns about the Quadratic Funding round on Gitcoin

IV. Community Reflections

ZuPoll

• We're excited that that the Zuzalu-native voting infrastructure ZuPoll was used for deciding the Hackers' Choice awards at ETHBerlin and ETHPrague 🏆
• New and improved UX for PODBox, the self-hostable platform for issuing ZuPasses. Please join the Zupass Builder's Hub to learn more! Vote on 6 temperature check questions from ZuPoll now: I'll share the results in next month's newsletter!

Check out Jon Hillis's piece on his learnings from popup villages after participating in Zuzalu, Vitalia, and Edge Esmeralda!

What advice would you give to yourself 1 year ago? *"*Just show up, sometimes it will seem like none care but the joy of life is keep showing up. "

"Be patient while be brave"

"Worry less; you're here for a short time and you can't do everything. Focus on doing the most interesting things."

What is a recent technological or scientific advancement that excited you and why? A new "Bridge editing" technique for editing DNA was announced, and it looks much better than CRISPR https://www.newscientist.com/article/2437237-bridge-editing-could-be-even-better-at-altering-dna-than-crispr/

V. Upcoming Events from the Community

1. Luma calendar** **- Town Halls, Zuzalu Software All Hands, ZuCafe, and ZuLit (recurring)
2. Aya Hub Founders Program (Q3)
   1. For innovators in the African tech ecosystem
3. Vitalia.city - ​​​​Accelerate & Live Forever (July 1 - 31, 2024)
   1. Accelerate & Live Forever is starting!! Vitalia is still getting registrations for the July Summer Program! https://lu.ma/vitalia-summer-program
   2. People can attend for the whole month, a week, or a few days.
4. ETHCC (July 8 - 11, 2024)
5. **ETHGlobal Brussels **(July 12 - 14, 2024)
6. ZuVillage Georgia (July 20 - August 31, 2024)
   1. See our final schedule and apply here.
7. VitaliTea camp pop-up at Burning Man (August 25 - September 2, 2024)
8. Zuitzerland: Prototyping a Swiss inspired Network Society** (**August 25 - September 15, 2024)
   1. Interlaken, Switzerland
9. The Archipelago in Chiang Mai, Thailand (Sep 20 - Nov 10, 2024) 📆 If you'd like an event to be included, please make sure to submit it to the form! Events are carried over each month until they have ended. 📝

VI. Conclusion

See you on July 10th for our next Town Hall, hosted by Nicole as a hybrid event with Zuzaluans IRL at EthCC! I'll join from the airport en route to Georgia -- I can't wait to see and live with many of you again there! With Zuzalove, Veronica