Summary of Proposal
The Community Hub is a field node inside Devconnect - a temporary space for Ethereum builders to engage with the practical realities of pop-up and permanent villages, through case studies, and direct exchange with practitioners. It focuses on the bridge between pop-up communities - short-lived, high-intensity testbeds, and permanent village models as long-term governance sandboxes.
Motivation and Rationale
The Community Hub will serve as a field node inside Devconnect — a temporary space focused on studying the wide range of use-cases for web3 and self-organisation focused projects like pop-ups and hubs across the Ethereum community. These take many shapes: hack-villages, artistic retreats, technical residencies, intentional living experiments. Each carries different goals and dynamics. As many of the experiments move into more permanent or long-term plans, this hub will act as a point of coming together to reflect and evolve collective thinking while avoiding group think and leadership capacities, enabling learning, cross-pollination and connection between each independent hub.
The primary objective of this Hub is to drill into the substance of these experiments through a defensive acceleration (d/acc) lens:
- What worked? What did not work? For which use-case?
- How did projects so far coordinate around d/acc-alignment?
- Where did friction, failure, or unintended consequences show up?
- Which design choices increased resilience, safety, and adaptability?
- How might lessons from short-term gatherings inform more permanent community infrastructure?
Through case study deep dives and exchanges with practitioners, the Hub creates a setting for clear-eyed analysis rather than surface celebration. The aim is to translate lived experience into usable insight for Ethereum builders: what to consider, what to avoid, how to differentiate, and how intentional communities might serve as bounded test environments for future coordination tools.
The hub perfectly complements Devconnect ARG and the Ethereum World’s Fair by addressing the human infrastructure layer highlighting how Ethereum technology can power society sandboxes.
Implementation
Production Requirements and Equipment:
We need a flexible space for both intimate discussions and presentations.
Beyond standard AV, we would need mobile whiteboards, reconfigurable seating (ideally some beanbags for chilling, and some more formal seating for workshops, and a moderation kit. Additional materials include community showcase banners, access to printer and printed tokenomics/legal framework resources. If available we would like to host some discussions and workshops in a room vs an open space.
Sample Program: (Daily Operating Hours: 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM):
Anchoring the Hub’s sessions in the principles of defensive acceleration (d/acc) ensures that we go beyond surface-level storytelling about pop-ups and residencies. Instead of “pop-up tourism,” the Hub becomes a structured inquiry into how these temporary communities generate hard lessons on privacy, decentralization, resilience, and safety — and how those lessons can be translated into Ethereum’s human infrastructure.
Day 1 — Hubs as d/acc proliferation and defensive social layer
- What have we learned in the last 2 years of Zu + other pop-ups / hubs?
- How can hubs and projects coordinate around d/acc?
- Defensive
- Decentralised
- Democratic
- Differential
+cyber/info-defense
Day 2 — Privacy + Safety (Social + Technical)
- How do we create bounded sandboxes that minimize risks while enabling experimentation?
- How to provide auditable functional guarantees to your users, residents and stakeholders?
- Lessons from pop-up organisers
- What breaks under pressure — and how pop-ups fail safely.
Day 3 — Community and Hubs’ Resilience
- Distributing authority in temporary but high-stakes environments.
- How to start a successful intentional community
- How to make hubs more sustainable and investable?
- How to govern hubs to be successful + capture resistant?
- Which business models and industries have proven useful?
- What different use-cases have arisen? (huge: cooperative, incubator, research, guilds)
Day 4 - Financial Sustainability & Tokenomics
- Governance and execution lessons from permanent hub projects
- How to apply these models to establish financially sustainable permanent hubs?
- Exploring interoperable tokenomics that enable local autonomy
- Transnational networks
- Hub Autonomy
- Models for residency and citizenship Interhub incentives
Day 5 — Regulation & Interfaces
- How do pop-ups interact with states, local laws, and institutional frameworks?
- Experiences + Learnings from those already in flight
Team:
The Community Hub is initiated by Zuitzerland, with participation involving local and international pop-ups and hubs such as Crecimento, ZuAfrique, ZuVillage, Zugrama, urbe.eth, et al. who will contribute via dedicated liaisons.
Disclaimer: we have only just started reaching out to relevant projects and builders, and will update over the coming weeks.
Logistics team and community contributors:
Organizing team members brings hands-on experience from multiple web3 pop-up villages, including Zuzalu initiatives and Network State experiments. Collectively they represent a vast wealth of experience in Ethereum, DAOs, governance, policy, Zuzalu, pop-ups and the development of permanent hubs. The two co-hosting teams are both actively building permanent hubs and bring a deep understanding and experience with executing according to Vitalik’s d/acc principles, and are committed to bringing intellectual honesty and depth of analysis to this community hub, in a way that helps move the space forward. Their competence lies in translating lived experiments into structured insight, and their strategic value comes from connecting lessons across diverse communities to surface patterns that matter for Ethereum builders.
