Edge Esmeralda Workshop 2024

The Edge Esmeralda Workshop 2024 was a Summer of Protocols gathering held during Edge Esmeralda 2024 — Edge City's month-long popup village in Healdsburg, California, which ran June 2–30. The workshop brought protocol researchers and Edge City's broader network of builders, researchers, and community designers into direct conversation.

Sessions explored futures and worldbuilding through the lens of protocol design, facilitated by Venkatesh Rao and Tim Beiko. Edge Esmeralda provided a distinctive setting: an ongoing experiment in community infrastructure and governance that offered live, embodied context for discussions about how protocols shape coordination in emerging communities. The proximity to ~1,300 participants actively prototyping new institutional and communal forms gave the research conversations an unusual degree of practical grounding.

Edge Esmeralda was the first of two Edge City collaborations in 2024 — followed by the Edge Lanna Workshop in Chiang Mai that autumn. The collaboration continued in 2025 with a second Edge Esmeralda Workshop.