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Guest Talk with Janine Leger | Zuzalu: A First of Its Kind IRL Pop-up Community

TalkJanine Leger
Guest Talk with Janine Leger | Zuzalu: A First of Its Kind IRL Pop-up Community

Janine Leger, organizer of Zuzalu, presents the two-month pop-up community experiment in Montenegro (200 residents, 600+ visitors, funded largely by Vitalik Buterin) as a case study in deliberate community design, highlighting principles like proximity, kindness/curiosity as trust-building culture, decentralized social tech (zoopass, zuzalu.city scheduling), rituals, and local integration with Montenegrin officials. She draws explicit parallels to the Summer of Protocols cohort, urging the researchers to adopt similar practices—small core teams relying on broader groups, visitor rotation to avoid insularity, public 'dogfooding' of in-progress work, and rituals—to build a sustainable, collaborative research community.

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