Edge City’s Request for Experiments
A call to test new ways of learning, governing, building trust, and living together.
Startup culture has a useful ritual: Requests for Startups. Institutions who back founders name the things they think should exist and invite builders to take them seriously.
We think we need the same thing for societal experiments.
The reason is simple: things are changing faster than our institutions can make sense of them. AI is entering classrooms, workplaces, creative tools, and civic life. Wearables and biotech are changing what people can measure and optimize about their health. We have new decentralized rails for money, identity, governance, and coordination. The technology keeps moving, while the basic social questions remain strangely undertested: how should people learn, govern, build trust, allocate resources, share space, stay healthy, raise kids, and live together?
The missing layer is places where people can try answers in miniature, under real conditions, with enough duration and trust for the second-order effects to show up. Startups, papers, conferences, and fellowships all matter, but they mostly test products, arguments, and networks. They rarely test new social forms directly.
So this is a Request for Experiments: deliberate tests of new ways of living and coordinating at human scale. A real question, tried with real people under real conditions, with results other people can learn from.
A place to run them
Edge City is our attempt to build part of that missing infrastructure. Popup villages create density, duration, and trust in a way that normal institutions struggle to assemble. At Edge Esmeralda, people live together for a month; they can try a governance protocol, a health study, a community currency, or an agent system with the same group of willing participants, iterate quickly, and publish what they learn.
Edge is one testbed. We hope there are many more.
Over the past three years, Edge City has run nine popup villages across four continents, with hundreds of builders, researchers, founders, artists, families, technologists, and organizers living together for a month at a time. Some of the clearest examples have already come from past villages. Constellation collected one of the largest real-world neural datasets ever gathered outside a lab, with participants wearing neural caps for an hour a day across four weeks; they recently raised $10M to build the future of consumer neurotech. Fulcra Dynamics aggregated real-time data from hundreds of wearables into a live dashboard of community-wide patterns in sleep, movement, and stress. A team built an off-grid solar-powered datacenter as a working proof of concept.
That is the loop we want more of: hypothesis, prototype, real-world use, public learning, and sometimes a company or institution that keeps going.
Areas for experimentation
The list below is a starting map of areas where faster real-world learning would matter. These range from rigorous studies to prototypes, governance pilots, cultural formats, and infrastructure tests. A good experiment leaves something behind: a writeup, a dataset, a protocol, an open-source tool, a failed attempt other people can learn from, or a project that keeps going after the month ends.
At Edge Esmeralda 2026, a few experiments are already underway. The Agent Village is a persistent multi-agent simulation embedded in village life, exploring what happens when AI agents take on real coordination roles in a community. Through our partnership with Alethios, every participant gets free access to professional research tools, so experiments can produce publishable findings. We are also running an Agent Village experiment to see how introducing agents to communities affects the experience of the people within them.
We would love to see people bring more experiments to Edge Esmeralda this summer, run them in other contexts, or propose better ones.
1. Intelligence, Governance & Autonomy
The conversation about AI is dominated by productivity and enterprise adoption. We want to test a different set of questions: what happens when AI is embedded in how people actually live together, make decisions, allocate resources, and coordinate as communities?
AI agents in community life
AI delegation experiment. Give residents the option to have AI agents attend meetings, vote on proposals, or negotiate resources on their behalf. Measure what people delegate and what they keep.
Village-wide AI assistant. Build a community AI that helps with scheduling, introductions, wayfinding, and surfacing relevant information across the village.
Agent-to-agent negotiation. What happens when AI agents representing different residents coordinate shared resources or resolve scheduling conflicts?
Governance & collective decision-making
Liquid democracy pilot. Let residents delegate votes to trusted proxies on specific village decisions. Compare outcomes with direct voting.
Prediction markets for community planning. Can markets outperform committees at allocating shared resources?
Quadratic funding for village public goods. Let the community allocate real capital to projects using quadratic mechanisms.
2. Community Economics & Financial Infrastructure
Programmable money has been talked about for years. We want to see it tested in a real micro-economy, with real transactions, by people who actually live together.
Community economics
Community currency. Design and deploy a currency for a month-long village economy. What do people use it for, and what do they avoid?
Stablecoin-native commerce. In past villages, participants used the World App and stablecoins for everyday purchases. Go further: build the full infrastructure for a stablecoin-native village economy.
Micro-grant mechanism. Real-time community capital allocation through onchain tools. Let residents fund projects and public goods on a rolling basis.
Protocol design & infrastructure
Decentralized compute at village scale. Last year a team built an off-grid solar-powered datacenter as a proof of concept. Scale it up.
Onchain coordination for shared resources. DAOs, multisigs, and governance frameworks applied to actual village decisions and budgets.
Privacy & identity
Privacy-preserving community participation. Can residents engage in governance, reputation, and economic systems without exposing personal data? Test it.
Portable identity across village apps. A decentralized identity layer that works across the village’s tools and platforms.
3. Environments of Tomorrow
Edge Esmeralda is a prototype for a permanent new town, Esmeralda. That makes it a live testing ground for ideas about how communities should be physically designed and sustained.
Mobility & infrastructure
Micro-mobility experiment. Deploy a fleet of e-bikes, scooters, or other micro-mobility options. Measure adoption, usage patterns, and impact on community interaction. A natural sponsorship opportunity for micro-mobility companies.
Shared infrastructure models. Co-owned tools, kitchens, maker spaces, and workspaces. What gets used, what gets neglected, and why?
Energy & sustainability
Community-scale solar and storage. Build on last year’s off-grid datacenter. Test solar, battery, and smart grid systems at village scale.
Real-time sustainability tracking. Measure and visualize the environmental footprint of an 800-person village. Make it visible and actionable.
Food systems
Village-scale shared meals. How does the design of shared food systems affect social cohesion, health outcomes, and community satisfaction?
Community-supported agriculture. Test local sourcing, group nutrition optimization, or farm-to-table models at village scale.
Community design & social protocols
Social matching and serendipity. Build a protocol that increases the rate of meaningful connection between residents. Measure it.
Community energy management. Design for the natural rhythms of a month-long gathering so people thrive rather than burn out. Track energy levels, social activity, and rest patterns.
4. Health, Longevity & Consciousness
A month-long village with hundreds of willing participants, biomarker data, and professional research tools through our Alethios partnership creates conditions that are hard to assemble in a clinical or academic setting.
Health & human performance
Community-wide circadian protocol. What happens to sleep, mood, and cognitive performance when 200+ people follow the same circadian rhythm for 30 days? The sample size and duration could make this unusually valuable if designed well.
Wearable data dashboard. Fulcra Dynamics built version one of this at Edge Esmeralda 2025. Go further this year: make it predictive, and open-source the infrastructure.
Cold/heat exposure and breathwork study. Popular at Edge, and worth studying more rigorously with biomarkers and a control group. There should be plenty of willing participants if the study is well-designed and clearly explained.
Consciousness & contemplative science
Group meditation tracked with neural data. EEG, HRV, and physiological instruments measuring contemplative practice across a cohort over multiple weeks.
Collective synchronization study. Does group practice produce measurable synchronization across participants?
Contemplative outcomes over a month. Track the relationship between practice and measurable outcomes in focus, wellbeing, and social connection.
Biotech & longevity
Aging biomarker tracking. Measure biological age markers before and after a month of optimized living conditions.
Democratized clinical research. Use the Alethios platform to design and run a structured, IRB-ready study with village participants.
5. Startups, Education & Culture
Edge Esmeralda is where new companies get their first users, where education can be reimagined with real students, and where culture and technology collide.
Startups & founder acceleration
Launch to a live user base. Ship a product to 500 potential users on day one and iterate daily. Very few environments offer this quality of immediate feedback.
AI-native company sprint. Can a small team build a viable company in a month with AI tools and a willing community of early adopters?
Founder & team matching protocol. A structured experiment in connecting complementary co-founders or founding team members. Track the outcomes.
Education & learning
AI-augmented learning in small groups. What does the social architecture of learning look like when every student has access to a world-class AI tutor?
Intergenerational learning. Formats that pair kids with working professionals. 160+ kids and families attended in 2025.
Peer-to-peer credentialing. Can a community develop its own lightweight mechanisms for recognizing expertise?
Creative technology & culture
Generative AI as creative collaborator. Give artists access to frontier AI tools and a month to explore. What new forms emerge?
Interactive art that responds to community data. Art installations driven by real-time village data: movement, mood, social patterns, weather.
6. Wildcards
Some of the best experiments will sit outside the categories above.
Collective attention redesign. What happens to 200+ people’s information diet, focus, and creative output if you redesign the social media layer for a month? Replace the feed with something designed for the community rather than for engagement. Measure what changes.
Play as infrastructure. Neighborhood-scale alternate reality games. Serious games as governance tools. Competitive play as a mechanism for resource allocation. Play is chronically underrated as a coordination technology, and a month-long village with hundreds of willing participants is a better testbed than any lab.
If your experiment sits outside these categories, that might be the best reason to propose it.
A note for sponsors and partners
Many of the experiments above will need practical support: funding, equipment, researchers, tools, venues, operators, and people who know how to turn a good question into a clean protocol. A micro-mobility company might support the mobility experiment. A health tech company might support the wearable data dashboard. A crypto protocol might fund the community currency. An AI lab might back the agent experiments.
If you are an organization interested in sponsoring or partnering on an experiment at Edge Esmeralda, reach out to telamon@edgecity.live. We’ll help you find the right experiment and the right format.
How to get involved
Three ways to participate at Edge Esmeralda:
Run an experiment. Bring a hypothesis and a protocol. Fill out our Programming Expression of Interest form.
Lead a residency. Curate a cohort of 10-20 builders or researchers around a shared thesis and spend a month shipping. Express interest through the Programming Expression of Interest form.
Participate. Your presence and participation make experiments possible. Get your ticket.
The best experiments at Edge have always come from someone showing up with an idea and making it happen. This is your invitation.
And if another context is better, run the experiment there. If you are building a popup village, campus, residency, school, neighborhood, lab, new town, or any other environment where people can test new social and technological forms in the real world, steal this list. Adapt it. Publish what you learn.
If you can fund, sponsor, instrument, evaluate, or publish experiments like these, we want to hear from you too.
Questions? Reach out to info@edgeesmeralda.com.
See you this summer.
Recognizing community expertise there was an effort a while back to develop badging. It seems the shortcomings there parallel what happens with wikis with the challenges of maintenance and curation. AI offer a reasonable conjecture for alternative approaches
I'd like to just show up somewhere and talk to people about my ideas. How Edge is that. I'm not the type to do things the way prescribed here, but I think you'd be leaving a lot on the table, weeding such people out by method. Hit me up I'd love to stop by. Is there a social scenario where we're all just chilling in an open place and can talk?