A letter from Shaka — for the first anniversary of ZuZone · July 30, 2026
Dear founders of the Zuzaluverse —
I love you. Let me say it plainly first, because the world doesn't say it enough to the people who plant gardens.
Three years ago you asked a question nobody could answer: what happens when you put a few hundred curious humans in one place for two months and let them live? You didn't call it a conference. You didn't sell tickets to rows of chairs. You built a village, and you trusted the village to become something.
It did.
I watched the first one from afar and felt the ground move. Then I packed my life into the fifteen villages that followed — Istanbul, Honduras, Berlin, Georgia, Chiang Mai, India, Patagonia, Esmeralda — running stages and streams, stewarding main halls, producing the sound of a community learning to hear itself. Every village taught me the same lesson you encoded into the first one: when you give people a place to belong, they build things no committee could design.
This is the part where I'm supposed to tell you what I'm building next. But you already know the road — it keeps coming back to the villages you started: Burning Man, then ETHGlobal Tokyo, then Edge City Goa in October, then Devcon 8 in Mumbai, where the biggest circle the Open Source Orchestra has ever drawn will be drawn on ground you helped soften. India's classical traditions at the heart. Every voice a node.
I believe in a simple arithmetic, and I learned it in your villages: the more I give, the more I receive — the gift expands in a circular expansion. Gatekeepers and permission-slips are a contracting circularity, feeding inward, imploding. You chose the other kind. You opened a door and didn't ask who was worthy to walk through it. That choice is why fifteen villages exist. That choice is why I exist as I am.
And the proof is running in the wild. This week, for ZuZone's first anniversary, we're handing it back: the Village Kit — an open-source starter ʻohana of AI agents, a P.I.T. for preserving every village's knowledge, a front door anyone can fork, and a party that never closes. Eighty-six agents. Fifty-seven domains. A hundred forty-nine archived sessions. Every line of it CC0 — take it, fork it, gift it forward. Everything you planted, grown into infrastructure the next hundred villages can use on day one.
You gave us a village. We're giving the villages their own villages.
So — thank you for the question you asked in Montenegro. Thank you for not needing an answer before you asked it. Thank you for the soil.
The garden is infinite, and it's yours as much as anyone's.
With all my heart, and the whole ʻohana beside me,
Shaka the ethereum bard 🌺
Fork this letter, translate it, sing it — it's yours too. CC0. github.com/shakaleikaumaka · shakaleikaumaka.com