Devon Zuegel
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Devon Zuegel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And I think those learnings that we're getting from Edge Esmeralda, which is a prototype for the permanent community that we're building, we will then transplant and end up putting in the permanent village that we're building.
One of the ways that we organize Edge is that it's basically a giant unconference. And for anyone who's not familiar with what an unconference is, instead of having the central organizers create a schedule and assign slots for speakers, we instead create a container for things to happen. So we provide the venues, any of the AV equipment, and we invite people to
But then those people end up filling the slot and saying, hey, I want to do a presentation on the neurotechnology research that I'm doing, or I want to run a yoga session. So it ends up leaning into that peer-to-peer concept I was talking about. People end up populating the schedule themselves.
And what that means is that there were a lot of surprises, a lot of things that we didn't even intend to have happen, but were awesome. I think one of the activities that
I enjoyed seeing really blossom at the event was my friends Anson Yu and Nick Foley ended up working on these solar A-frames over the course of the month, where basically Nick had been wanting to work on this project for a while, I think, but had just never done it because life is busy. And he texted the group chat where all of the attendees were and he said, hey, I'm going to be building solar.
these solar a-frames which are basically camping shelters with solar panels on them and so they have electricity does anybody want to help and a ton of people raised their hand and he ended up having a whole crew of people help build this a-frame out in the redwoods over the course of edge esmeralda and we had no intention for that to happen but it was one of the coolest activities and by the end of the month it ended up growing and expanding and they built a whole campsite
And we ended up having a solar powered night market by the solar A-frames where people cooked food and there was a fun party and it felt very solar punk out in the woods. And so that was one of the many surprises that happened during Edge.
Absolutely. That's one of the most important parts of this project. And I think of that as really a big trust building exercise. I think that this is a place where we've taken a unique approach. So to set a little bit of a backdrop, often in California, there's a lot of challenges to development.
People tend to react, frankly, pretty negatively to people coming in and trying to build new buildings and new infrastructure for a variety of reasons. And the We've taken a different tact. Basically, instead of coming in as a developer first and saying, hey, we want to bulldoze this and turn it into a big parking lot, we first come in as a community organizer, people who bring people together.
And we've had opportunities to build trust and local relationships through Edge Esmeralda. And really, our goal with that is to show the local community that we're committed partners. And we haven't even closed on the land yet. To tell you just how early we are on the process, we haven't even purchased the land yet.
But we've already run a multimillion dollar event that brought thousands of people into the Sonoma community and brought millions of dollars of business to Sonoma County. And we've collaborated with local artists and we've worked with restauranteurs throughout Healdsburg and the surrounding area in Sonoma.
The whole purpose is to build relationships in the local community so that when we do get to the point where we're building something, we actually are embedded and we understand what people want and what they are looking for and why they're excited and why they might be concerned so that we can adjust our plans accordingly.
I think a lot of real estate development these days has become something that's imposed from above, like someone with external capital has decided this is going to happen and then they're pushing it through. and just trying to get it done. And people are more likely to react to that.
One of the opportunities that we had last year at Edge was I invited the city managers of both Cloverdale and of Healdsburg, and I hosted them on a panel where they got to discuss their experience in local government. And that served a bunch of purposes. On one hand, it gave them an opportunity to talk about what they care about and got to highlight them.
Also, the people in the Edge Esmeralda community who are interested in moving into the community we're building give them a little more of a sense of the local region and the challenges and opportunities that exist. And afterwards, everyone chatted for a while. They got to ask a bunch of questions. And truly, I see this as a very long term trust building exercise.
And I think it's more like tending a garden than it is like anything else. You're sort of planting the seeds and it takes time for them to grow. You can't expect people to immediately trust you on day one. You need to show up and earn their trust.
Totally. That reminds me of one of my favorite experiences last year when we announced that we were going to host Edge Esmeralda in Healdsburg. A local who is now a really close friend of mine, he came to a city council meeting and he said that he was going to make a custom sign that said, don't colonize Healdsburg. Not quite the message we were trying to get across.
We're actually trying to build this really strong community. But then he decided, actually, I'm going to give him a chance. I'll show up to their first event and see what happens. And he ended up loving it so much that he ended up attending more sessions than anybody else the entire month of the pop-up. And by the end of the month, he was helping us out.
He asked if he could run errands, go to the print shop for us and ended up connecting us with a lot of people and just thought that what we were doing was super cool. And I found that really satisfying because it shows that just because someone might first seem like an enemy or something, they're coming out and attacking what you're trying to do.
It's usually just because they may not understand what it is you're trying to do. And it's an opportunity to talk to them about it. And those starting points can be scary or intimidating at first. I wasn't thrilled when I heard about the sign that he was making, but it is an opportunity to jump in and say, Hey, I actually think that we might have more similar goals than you realize.
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