Participants in experimental community projects don't necessarily object to centralized decision-making. But they do mind when the gap between decentralization rhetoric and the centralized operational reality they encounter on the ground is wider than expected. Managing expectations regarding which decisions will sit with community organizers and which are to be shaped by participant feedback is a key activity that may shape community member willingness to remain or return. This is a finding the broader ecosystem of popup cities and network-state experiments will likely recognize.
In the final week of major programming at an experimental community we’re calling “Alphaville,” we sat down with a focus group of seven participants to learn about their experiences. They had spent weeks together as residents building personal and professional relationships, running experiments, attending workshops, and navigating shared living, while watching the Alphaville project unfold around them.
Throughout the 75-minute session, they opined on what worked at Alphaville and what didn’t. They also shared Alphaville-specific insights within the broader context of pop-up cities and parallel-society experiments, and these community initiatives’ overall attempts to prototype something genuinely new: alternative models of community, governance, and civic life.
Participants praised Alphaville as intellectually rich, indicating the community was full of people willing to engage seriously with deep questions. They also highlighted their appreciation for Alphaville’s rare willingness to actively build alternative civic and governance models rather than just analyze them. They commended the project’s ambitions to try something hard in uncharted territory without a tested playbook.
Frustrations also arose.
The most consistent criticisms centered around a perceived contradiction between Alphaville’s decentralization rhetoric and its more centralized operational execution. This distinction between the aspiration to decentralize and the tendency to revert to centralization proved to be one of the most important findings of our study. We note that what to decentralize (authority, tech infrastructure, ownership, etc.) and how are a broader set of questions the field is still wrestling with, which is why we think the findings presented in the Alphaville focus group study are vital for anyone trying to prototype new forms of community, governance, or civic life. More than anything else, the utility of these focus group findings to future community builders is why we think this study is worth sharing publicly.
Alphaville is the pseudonym for an experimental community we studied through a single in-person focus group with 7 participants. The study used Braun and Clarke’s thematic analysis and identified four interrelated themes: participant experience and well-being; social dynamics and inclusion; event organization and structure; and vision, purpose, and future engagement.
Because it shapes everything that follows, we want to highlight to the reader up front that four of the five authors of this study were themselves residents at Alphaville for the duration of the initiative. We were embedded participants, not external observers. Our fifth author, who had no on-site presence, conducted the thematic coding independently to introduce some analytic distance. We acknowledge in the study that this arrangement introduces selection, interpretive, and advocacy risks, and we’ve tried to be transparent about them. Readers should treat the findings as exploratory and situated rather than generalizable. The full study, including methodology, limitations, and our positionality statement, is linked again at the end of this post.
Participants particularly praised the curation of attendees and the quality of conversations that emerged in informal settings, e.g., late-night discussions, meal preparation and enjoyment, and collaborative tasks. The project's visionary ambition was widely commended, even by those with specific operational concerns. A majority of participants told us they would return to a future iteration of Alphaville. When participants in experimental communities describe genuine intellectual value and willingness to return despite acknowledged frustrations, we interpret that as an indication of what the project is getting right.
Many of the strongest reactions participants shared were positive. One participant told us, “I found amazing people, and I found a really high bar of conscious thought about important and deep issues.”
Alongside positive reactions, participants also raised a set of tensions that the broader field will likely recognize. The most consistent of these concerned the gap between decentralization as a stated value and the more centralized operational reality participants observed on the ground. One participant put it this way:
“They want to do bottom-up stuff, but then they don’t. Well, in that case, they actually don’t want that. They just want to portray that. I think there was an intention. They just could not keep it together to make it happen. And I think it’s fine that things are a bit more centralized, but that needs to be clearly communicated that that’s the route we’re taking for these and these reasons.”
We highlight this quote because we see it as emblematic of a pattern documented in the broader field for years among governance researchers studying DAOs and other distributed-authority projects. The participant wasn’t asking for less centralization per se, but rather for more transparency about where decision-making resides. Is it only with a small core team of organizers, or is wider participation from community members welcome? The tendency toward a “centralized decentralization” effect appears in platform governance and DAO literature; its presence in a place-based, in-person community suggests it is not confined to digital infrastructure alone and can occur in any mission-driven initiative under time and resource pressure. Therefore, Alphaville is by no means alone in struggling with the problem of “centralized decentralization.”
Participants also described confusion about the project’s core intention. “What is the goal?” one participant asked. “Is it a network state node? Is it a special economic zone? Is it a glorified coworking space? ... If we can’t even define the thing that we’re going towards, how can we discuss whether we’re going towards it or not?” The question of direction is one Alphaville will need to answer for itself, and the difficulty is compounded by the fact that the available terminology (network state, network state node, popup city, permanent hub, etc.) remains genuinely contested across the ecosystem, i.e., our observations external to Alphaville indicate that projects working under these banners are themselves still negotiating what they mean. Our reading of the Alphaville focus group is that participants wanted the community organizer to take a clearer position about its own direction within a conversation that the whole field is still having.
The overall picture participants painted is that Alphaville succeeded in generating real intellectual and social value while struggling to navigate the gap between stated values and operational practice (a gap many initiatives in this space encounter).
We don’t read participants’ critical feedback as rejection of the project. The seven participants were, by recruitment design, broadly aligned with the aims of network-state experimentation. Their willingness to engage critically is the kind of feedback genuinely committed participants offer when they think a project is worth getting right.
We also note that the recommendations below, drawn from participants' comments, aren’t specific to Alphaville. Namely:
State the governance model honestly.
Pre-establish rules and conflict resolution mechanisms before they’re needed.
Invest in community-building infrastructure commensurate with the project's social ambition.
Resolve the question of what the experiment is actually trying to demonstrate.
None of these recommendations should be interpreted as prescribing a specific model. Instead, they identify decisions that organizers in this space (Alphaville and otherwise) would optimally make early, explicit, and visible in the future.
These findings are drawn from a single 75-minute focus group with seven people in one community, conducted at the end of an intense, weeks-long experience. We recommend viewing them as a snapshot rather than a comprehensive account of the entire Alphaville project. We also name several other limitations in the full study. Our hope is that this work offers a textured view of how participants in one prototyping initiative experienced dynamics that almost certainly persist across the larger pop-up and network-state ecosystem. The questions worth pursuing now concern not whether communities like Alphaville can launch, but whether they can successfully iterate.
The full study is available here under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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