Through the Portal
How we hosted a pop-up campus in Porto
Portal was a month-long pop-up campus for 30 people with projects that take subjective experience seriously. It was hosted in July 2024 in Porto, Portugal by Bea and me.
The TLDR:
To grow, we need a great context, a local intellectual scene.
There are enough people in our twitter neighborhood doing relevant projects, and the scene is ready for longer events after years of mostly short camps.
Invite these people to a long event and you simultaneously strengthen their work AND the underlying social fabric.
It went very wholesomely. It was a good duration for a first experience but could’ve gone longer.
Conception
In April 2024 I was feeling lonely and desirous of intellectual community. We'd just come back from 3 months in the Bay area and I was taking some time to do independent research and writing.
I missed being in a lively milieu, where my ideas and work could diffuse naturally through the social graph and feed energy back to me as people got excited and built on them, and where I could do the same for others.
At the same time, it seems like my favorite people on twitter have something in common. They're usually rigorous systematic thinkers who take subjectivity seriously, be it via qualia research, therapy, applied AI, group facilitation, meditation, etc.
Since 2022, people have been meeting at shorter events (usually 3-4 day camps), and keeping ambiently in touch on twitter, but have rarely spent long periods of time together.
Inspired by the Medley residence that ran for 10 weeks in Berlin, and the Fractal Collective in NYC, we asked “What would happen in a month-long pop-up campus?” How could it ignite people's own work, collaboration, and their personal relationships?
We had already organized Xiqweek in October 2023 (a 4 day weekend unconference / retreat in Porto for ~30 people) so we felt confident enough to try a more ambitious event.
A single group house would’ve been too busy and more logistics work than we wanted. Providing just a workspace seemed ideal, with people being responsible for their own food and accommodation while sharing the city. Maybe we could even get some people to fall in love with it and move to Porto!
I sent out a tweet to gauge interest. The very next day we serendipitously found a venue and threw up a website. This was happening.
Venue Prep
We spent the month of June preparing. Our serendipitously found venue was a semi-abandoned house, soon to be demolished. There was a lot of renovating, cleaning, mopping, painting, and furniture assembly to do.
People would be responsible for their own housing and food and we would provide a co-working space during weekdays. The decision to keep the space closed on weekends came down to a desire to encourage work-life balance and for our own rest as organizers. There were two quiet work rooms, a potentially noisy collaboration room, a private call room, a bathroom, and a cozy and creative break room with snacks. All the workspaces were movement friendly, with standing, seated desks, standing desks, floor desks, yoga balls, foam blocks, and rugs for floor time.
We charged €150 per week with most people getting early bird tickets at €100. The money went largely towards furniture (desks, chairs, pillows, rugs, lights, plants), gear (office supplies, projector, speakers), and snacks (water, fruit, protein bars, milk, juice, coffee, tea).
We scheduled daily check-ins (more on this below), weekly retrospectives, and fireside Friday potlucks.
We also asked for 2 cleaning volunteers per day, made a cleaning checklist and supplies basket to streamline the process, and recorded a cleaning tutorial that we shared in our telegram group chat. We found that it was easier to get people to commit if we asked for volunteers during check-in than if it was a loose expectation or group-chat reminder.
There was also a trusty group house for 6 people which served as a hub in the evenings.
Participants
The Interest Cascade
Our first real challenge was triggering the participant cascade. We had to get some of our closest friends to commit and book tickets and accommodation. In retrospect, we ended up spending a lot more time browsing airbnb for each of them than if we’d booked a single big house upfront!
We warmly invited friends and acquaintances we admire and also took their recommendations for other participants. Once we got the first ~8 people, we had a rush of applicants. We accepted almost everyone who applied, although people self-selected pretty heavily. 30 people attended in total, with ~20 participants on any given week.
Projects
The original idea was to gather people with relevant projects that were relatively mature. We definitely got some mature projects, but we ended up accepting participants in initial and exploratory stages of their work.
PORTAL PROPER
As always, people were ready to take initiative and do things. They organized workshops, brought endless painting supplies, an exercise frame thing with a pull-up bar, extra office supplies, assembled a massive DIY whiteboard, sourced firewood, brought books, and filming, and audio gear.
Socializing was revealed to be just as important as work, if not more at times. I get it, why would you do the same computer work you’d do at home when surrounded by amazing people in a beautiful city? The weaving of social fabric often took precedence.
Focused work still happened of course. It was important to us that there was a culture of work in the space, with “focus hours”, so that people would feel inspired by one another and delve into their projects, without feeling too much FOMO from the socializing.
A Typical Day (from my perspective)
On a typical weekday I would wake up at 8AM, walk 20 mins to open Portal at 9AM, and work in a quiet room until group check-in at noon. Check-in was the time to deal with logistics and exchange feedback and vague wishes and workshop announcements. Afterwards, most of us would go out to lunch and the afternoon would be peppered with workshops, light work, group collaboration, or walks in the nearby botanical garden. At 7PM, volunteers would start cleaning and we’d be out by 7:30PM. Often I would go home, but when I had energy I’d join a group for dinner and sometimes reconvene at the group house for games and chats.
Our roles
We felt like we had four “modes”:
Object-level work:
I was writing essays, and later recording interviews and working on a software project - mostly in the mornings.
Socializing
I had wonderful people that I was keen on getting to know better with their own interesting projects and workshops;
Organizing
My organizing work felt like gardening, largely. Create and maintain suitable conditions, establish feedback loops, remove threats. A few points:
Keeping up the infrastructure like food, water, hygiene, temperature.
Harmonizing between the outside world and participants. This includes the owners (with whom we were sharing the house), neighbors, mailmen - in stuff like noise levels and certain cultural differences.
Making sure that people could do what they want in work and play. Making sure there was always quiet space, that people felt safe, that they felt empowered to take initiative and organize things, etc
Create opportunities for group synchronization and for feedback - daily check-ins and weekly retrospectives.
Solve crises and mediate interpersonal conflict.
Documenting
I didn’t do as much of this as I wished, but I tried to reflect on how the space flowed during the day and take notes on its dynamics and possible improvements.
The Arc of Portal
There was a clear trajectory of the energy over the four weeks, with a clear rock bottom right at the middle point two weeks in, which you could liken to a hero’s journey (I won’t develop the metaphor sorry).
Week 1 - Arriving
People spent week 1 attuning to the space and to one another. There was some “heads down” work in the morning, but the break room was the hottest spot. There were constant conversations about big topics, sharing worldviews and translating between them. People were excited to have peers with so much shared context and invested in synchronizing with each other.
Week 2 - Growing pains
There were a few adjustments to the space. We made check-ins longer (from 15 to 45 mins), switched the quiet and the “loud” rooms, making the biggest room the louder one, and added big whiteboards. People addressed interpersonal frictions, and we had to mediate some conflict. We asked someone to not come back and it was a whole thing but there was consensus that it was for the best. Adversity seemed to make the group stronger.
Week 3 - Good vibes
Week 3 was golden. Great vibes. More people started focused work and taking projects seriously. A few projects sprouted after the initial attunement and conflict was addressed. Interpersonally, things felt playful and high trust.
Week 4 - Closing
Week 4 felt as good as week 3, although with more focus on relationships than work. The end of the event was on everyone's minds so there was an undercurrent of closing loops and cherishing time together.
There was a clear demarcation between weeks 1 and 2, and weeks 3 and 4. Six new people arrived on week 3, and it coincided with the end of week 2 where we resolved some conflict.
The executive decision of asking someone to leave
This could be its own blog post and I’m not sure how much to say here.
We asked this person to leave because they repeatedly pushed boundaries in slippery ways, and didn’t seem to listen or attune to others. After extensive talking, we had very low confidence they would actually change their behavior.
We consulted participants and mentors and concluded the best move would be to ask them to skip the rest of the event, while remaining open to future interactions. Our intuitions were later proven right by very erratic and concerning behavior.
After this episode passed, most if not all of us reported the event went smoothly and the vibes were good.
Structure and Process
We wanted to have minimal structure while still having it be possible to address the whole group and flexibly handle logistics, so we settled on having short daily check-ins, and a review at the end of each week.
We tuned the check-in format until they felt good and some time in week 3 we settled on
quick 2 min meditation
10 min 3-person pods to share feelings and intentions
popcorn-style round of logistics, workshop announcements, and vague wishes.
The weekly retro was always different.
In week 1 we just went around in a circle reflecting on the week and giving feedback. It felt mostly positive and maybe a bit superficial.
In week 2 we tried to be more structured and arranged post-its in three columns with one entry per person: “went well”, “went poorly”, “something to change”. We managed to get actionable changes to make for the following week.
Week 3 went really well and many of us didn't feel like doing a retro, we still gathered and took turns asking the circle for things we wanted: compliments, roasts, etc.
Week 4 was the final review. We had a show-and-tell for people’s projects and then I gave some parting words of perspective. We ended with a beautiful run of saying nice things about each other that left everyone's hearts tender.
Outcomes
By far the most important outcome was ✨ the friends we made along the way ✨. Each of us made new allies and can more deeply count on one another now.
Some people got to Portal and realized they actually needed to disconnect from their project for a while and enjoy the city and each others’ company.
Others focused on the event itself and hosted workshops instead of doing the same work they would do if they were at home by themselves.
Overall, I would say there was a lot of learning among participants. Both in object-level work topics, as in worldview and big picture stuff, as in subtle ways that come from spending time around someone’s nervous system. Some version of “internalizing the sage”, modeling how they pay attention and solve problems.
This is not to say that object-level progress wasn’t made!
Incremental progress on existing projects
Just a few examples
@_brentbaum shipped an update to refract.space.
@the_wilderless kept writing and teaching his course on inner wayfinding.
@simon_ohler started his book.
Julka progressed on and presented her animated documentary about the music scene in Łódź.
@nido_kween published essays about early childhood and mobility.
@this_is_silvia progressed on her high profile book cover work
In general people became much more productive around 2 weeks in, after settling in. Crucially, they became productive while staying playful and without coercion.
New projects!
@becomingbabyman and @meansinfinity made an app for playing affirmations while you sleep.
@AgotaDubi prototyped and iterated on a card game for getting in touch with yourself and creatively unblocking.
@Tangrenin, @emergentvibe and I recorded conversations with participants to share in podcast form. (still in production!)
@Tangrenin, @_brentbaum and I started a public community database of twitter archives, with a REST API so anyone can build data analysis tools on top of what should be public twitter data.
@frideswyth started tpot.website, a tpot magazine.
Testimonials
“I made something at portal! I went in without an expectation of that happening, happy to loosely touch an intention every second day. And the inspiration and support of everyone there showed me how much I enjoy making something when there are others around to interact with it, test it, talk with me about it! One of my recurring realizations there was just how much I was inspired to work on my own thing - and at the same time wanting nothing more than to hang out with these brilliant kind friends. You could argue that that proportion led to less 'nose to the grindstone' time with my project (it did) and at the same time I've never known I could make this much tangible progress without suffering/efforting. It was a revelation how actually truly feeling resourced (socially, emotionally..) kept me more inspired, more allowing of not-knowing, more connected, and more eager to keep reconnecting to my work. I love working near others, and also collabing, helping, jamming with each other.”
“During the last week of Portal I got a taste of the feeling that I could do anything I wanted to. I haven't had this kind of confidence much since high school, or the feeling of the world being my personal playground since childhood. I experienced confidence and optimism, the quiet kind that give me patience to stay grounded when what I try is frustrating or hard, to trust that the problem is solvable, and even fun to solve.”
I really like your hosting energy together in your own city. It feels like good vibes to me to support and be embedded in a place you have roots in, and to share that with others - I liked this aspect of Portal a lot.
I started writing my book in a few very meaningful sessions and hope to continue that. I was pretty work-focused in the beginning and relaxed fully in the last two days, the parties were sooo dope. Porto is gorgeous and so are you.
Lessons
As a dyad of organizers, we were unusually outward facing during the event and we would have benefited from checking in more with each other. We could also have done a better job of clearly demarcating our responsibilities. Sometimes stuff like the shopping list fell through the cracks.
Resolving conflict and kicking someone out was hard but important, everything felt much better afterwards. I was hesitant because the breaks in trust didn’t seem to merit expulsion on paper, but my intuition was very insistent. I learned to trust my gut more, as well as the intuition of others (generally women) who picked up on it earlier.
People had to attune and understand each other before collaboration could start, but once it did it felt grounded and sustainable.
This could be a whole other blog post, but I feel like there's some sense of shared mission clarity that emerged. It could be summarized in few words as “Trojan-horsing” worldviews that take well being and subjective experience seriously inside systematic explanations.
The weaving of robust social fabric was the most important outcome of Portal. These people are friends and allies now.
Next
We hope that as people engage with this write-up, the next steps will become clearer!
Xiq wants to keep supporting the budding scene systematizing wisdom traditions and to find ways to apply AI to sensemaking.
B wants to create parenting and community-oriented infrastructure.
We both want to move towards a local community that we feel nourished by and inspired to serve.
This was one of the best event writeups I've read! So clear, so succinct! It sounds like so much fun!! Count us in for the next one, if we can make it :) (although given all the responsibilities we tend to take, this feels unlikely)
reading this feels like a delicious brunch, so satisfying. I can't help but think this hints at a permanent local hub for smart/woo people to work/play together. I wonder if Porto is a realistic contender for getting critical mass of the kinds of people you want to attract. what do you think? would people move there more long term?