Edge City Lanna is a pop-up village, akin to a temporary campus, taking place Oct 10 — Nov 10, 2024 in beautiful Chiang Mai, Thailand. It will host 250 participants for a month of deep work and dynamic programming.
The event will be structured differently from most other events you’ve attended, so we wanted to share how we’re thinking about programming for this month-long gathering. By “programming”, we mean the event’s themes, residencies, programs, talks, study groups, unconference sessions, and so on.
Our event has some unique design focuses:
- 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 just 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 there having created something real, whether it’s a hardware prototype, a research paper, a piece of music, or a new company.
- 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 at least as much public-facing programming as well.
- Focus on Deep Work: we want this to be most productive month of our attendees’ lives.
- 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.
Our themes form five overarching areas of interest. Elements of each theme will be spread throughout the month to encourage learning and collaboration between experts in different fields.
New at Edge City Lanna: Residencies
Attendees of prior Edge City events will notice a new type of format for this event, which we are calling Residencies. These are essentially sub-villages that will be part of the overarching village, and will run in parallel while doing deep dives into specific topics over the whole month. We aim to have five residencies that will focus on specific projects and will co-create programming for all Edge City Lanna attendees.
Structure: Each residency will have 20-40 people and a key leader from the community designing the programming. Each will have their own unique approach and expectations from participants.
Participation: Residency participants will be focused on deepening their knowledge in their own field and progress in a project. Residency participants will engage in the broader Edge City Lanna experience from shared meals, daily healthy activities and co-creation of projects and programming.
As an attendee, you can join as part of a residency or as a normal participant for the whole city. More info on specific residencies to come soon!
Participation
We have three types of programming structures at Edge City Lanna:
- Residencies: these are month-long cohorts focused on specific projects within a theme.
- Programs: these are multi-day pieces of programming, focused on teaching and learning a specific topic.
- Workshops and Sessions: these can last a day or a few hours, and focus on a single topic.
There are several ways that you can participate to bring the Lanna calendar to life:
Lead a Program
Each program will have a lead whose job is to invite doers and builders in that field to join us in Lanna and help them connect with other people they can learn from and collaborate with. The ideal person is an expert who is well-connected in their respective field and has good insights about relevant programming. If you’re interested running a program, reach out to Timour at ‘@timourxyz’ on Telegram.
Potential Program focuses that we’d love to see:
- Programs that activate builder communities from Southeast Asia
- Programs focused on active experiments
- Programs focused on real-world applications of frontier tech
- Programs focused on local impact that will last beyond just the popup village event
Host a workshop or a session
If you want to share your expertise or lead a discussion about a topic you’ve always been curious about, start thinking about the details. We’ve noticed that people who co-create something at our events tend to get more out of them, and we’re here to help you figure out what you can offer!
We’ll share more information about how you can participate soon, but you should start by applying to join Lanna now.
Types of Programming
To get your inspiration flowing, here are some of our preferences regarding the programming that we’d like to see:
- Interactive workshops & salons: These are often more engaging than ‘sage on a stage’ talks or panels. Of course, there can be times for specific keynotes, but we want to break from the traditional mold and have more dynamic in-person discussions.
- Recurring study groups: These are for specific topics that can last a week or longer. This will allow smaller groups to go deep on a subject throughout an extended time period during the month. They can then present what they have developed to the community.
- Experiments / trials: We would love to see more applied trials and experiments that want to the popup village environment as a way to further their goals.
- Hackathons & builder sessions: There will be hackathons interspersed throughout the month. In addition to learning, we want folks to have a creation mindset throughout their time at Edge Esmeralda. Whatever creation means to you — build an MVP of a new app, conduct novel research, or write an essay!
- Mix of beginner- & expert-level programming: We understand that some experts will want to go deep with their peers to create fundamentally new insights and research, whereas others will want to engage with a wider interested audience. We’ll have a mix of both types of content, and sessions will be clearly labeled.
- Deep work time: Sometimes, no programming is the best programming. In the daytime during the week, we’ll have deep work time with no organized sessions. Feel free to collaborate with colleagues or new friends, but we won’t have anything on the shared calendar.
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. If we all engage, 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!