2026-07-09 –, Solidarity Station
When communities move off centralized platforms, they suddenly become responsible for decisions those platforms were making for them: membership and identity, moderation, and governance. You'll work in small groups, helping each other identify the assumptions you're already making about your communities. By the end, you'll have a written charter and map for your community and we'll harvest patterns from the group and compile a collective e-zine.
This is a workshop where each participant, working in groups of 2-3, designs a community using a 5 part framework to help identify the gaps in their understanding of the community's structure.
It is primarily participant driven, with the facilitator providing the framework and occasional guidance for the process. No high tech is required, because this is about the missing human piece of the equation. All they will need is a pen, some paper, and a 5-step creation ritual:
1. Intention. Why does this community exist? What is it protecting?
2. Naming. What do you call this place, and what does that name signal to strangers?
3. Architecture. How is the space structured? What's public, what's private, where do newcomers land?
4. Atmosphere. What does it feel like to be here? What behavior does the space encourage or discourage?
5. Threshold Rules. Who gets in? How do they earn trust? What gets someone shown the door?
One of the core reasons distributed systems adoption stalls is that people try decentralized tools, run into governance and design questions they weren't expecting, and fall back to letting someone else take responsibility. The missing piece is a practice for helping community builders surface and resolve the human decisions that need to happen before any technical infrastructure matters.
This workshop provides that practice. It gives participants a framework for designing community space with intention and helps them learn what they don't know they don't know. In the process they produce a written community charter and map they can take home and use. The goal is to build the kind of clarity that makes adopting decentralized infrastructure feel achievable rather than overwhelming.
Brad Hutcheson has spent 25 years developing distributed systems and trying to understand their implications. He's the founder of Kunuleco, an open-source protocol that lets any group build a space that belongs to them. It enables community that is not on a central platform and not determined by an algorithm. Your identity is portable and trust works like it does in real life: people vouch for people. He lives in Northern Colorado and is unreasonably optimistic about the future of community-owned infrastructure.