Edge Esmeralda: The Village with a Living Operating System on Notion
Edge Esmeralda uses Notion to coordinate a month-long pop-up village where roughly a thousand people gather to build, learn, and experiment together. All of the village’s knowledge and context lives in Notion, while AI agents help them take action as the village evolves in real time.
Welcome to the village that builds together
When Edge Esmeralda comes alive in Sonoma County, California, roughly a thousand people gather to connect, build, and test new ways of working and living.
It’s where Devon Zuegel’s vision for a new village in Sonoma County meets Janine Leger and Timour Kosters’ month-long pop-up village model. Esmeralda is the hardware—streets, public realm, infrastructure—and Edge City the software: programming, rituals, community.
The village is spontaneous, collaborative, and truly alive—which is both its beauty and operational challenge. A speaker gets added. A room changes. A session needs a microphone. A community member proposes something new minutes before it starts. The system behind the village has to move as quickly as the people in it.
A village that updates faster than a spreadsheet can
That’s why, every 15 minutes, Edge Esmeralda’s calendar updates itself.
A custom calendar, backed by a Postgres database, pulls new events into Notion on a rolling cadence. Inside Notion, the production team can open each event as its own page, add notes, and track A/V needs and other important details. The result is a living operating system for a living community: one place where the village can keep changing without losing itself.
Devon remembers the first year, when everything lived in spreadsheets and copied versions started to drift. “I get shivers just thinking about it,” she says.
We used to accept chaos as a tax of doing what we do, and now we have a really good system in place to help manage it.
Notion became the source of truth
The calendar is just one example: Notion is the shared context layer for Edge Esmeralda: the place where decisions, docs, forms, schedules, permissions, and operational details stay connected as things change. Timour describes it as “a source of truth for the village,” with different access points for attendees, team members, admins, guests, and speakers.
Notion also makes the village easier to join. A Notion-powered wiki gives attendees one place to orient themselves, while granular permissions let the team open the right parts of the workspace to volunteers, partners, speakers, and guests. People can contribute where they’re needed without exposing or cluttering the whole system.
That matters because Edge Esmeralda depends on participation. “We think of everybody here as creating the village with us,” Devon says.
With shared context, a community can move like a team.
Agents keep the village moving
AI and agents add another layer to the system. If Notion pages and databases are the village’s shared context, Notion Agents help put that context to work.
Timour uses agents to summarize inbound form submissions, flag important follow-ups, and send a weekly bulletin of new activity and takeaways from AI Meeting Notes.
For Devon, agents have replaced “a lot of late nights and stress” by helping her respond with the right context: if someone asks a question, AI can surface the relevant document or prior decision behind the answer.
The result is faster, more thoughtful communication—not generic automation.
Multiplayer AI makes the village more human
The bigger experiment is multiplayer AI: agents that help people find each other, coordinate, translate, negotiate, and make better collective decisions.
One attendee told the team that an agent helped them navigate the village as a shy, introverted person. It suggested people to meet and drafted messages explaining why a coffee might be worthwhile. Other attendees used agents to translate across languages. For Devon, those are the moments that point toward the future she wants.
That may be the deeper promise of Edge Esmeralda: a community that can preserve emergence without losing coherence. Notion gives the village a shared memory. AI helps route the right context to the right person at the right time. The village does the rest.
Technology is something that can bring us together and make our lives richer, rather than making us more solitary.
