I spent the week of July 7 at DWeb Camp 2026, held at Alte Hölle, a forest retreat in rural Brandenburg, Germany. If you get the chance, go. I ran a workshop called Design Your Own Place, and I came home with more than I brought.
The workshop was a simple idea. Put a few strangers at a table, give them an hour, and have them invent a community from nothing. Not a website for a community, the community itself. They named its membership tiers. They decided who gets in, who vouches, and what someone has to do to move from a guest to a trusted member. Then they wrote its founding charter.
The charters the groups wrote were better than my examples. People know what they want a community to be. They mostly lack a structure to say it plainly, and it turns out that giving them that and an hour is enough. In the process, I learned about Charles Vogl and how similar his work was to the Kunuleco community structure.
And that, right there, was what “nerd camp” was really about.
I have been building Kunuleco mostly alone for a long time. You start to assume the ideas underneath it are yours to carry by yourself. That the problems you are solving are unique and that somehow only you see them. A week in a forest full of people working on decentralized systems corrects that assumption fast.
That is the magic. You spend so long assuming the walls you keep hitting are yours alone, and then a stranger nods and says “oh yeah, but have you tried—” and something shifts.
I came home with a reading list, a few people I want to keep thinking alongside, and a handful of conversations that are still going. Some of them will turn into real work. I will (hopefully) write about those as they take shape. For now it is enough to say that the ideas Kunuleco is built on have company, and that a week in the woods was the thing that showed me.
I can’t wait to see you all again at the next camp.