Back to Shared Reality, Forward to Human Flourishing
WAMO originates from a folk imagination in Yunnan, China —
a small cat standing on the edge of a tiled roof, with an exaggerated and powerful mouth, devouring evil and guarding spiritual order.
In our context, WAMO is not merely an image, but a symbol:
altruism, guardianship, and the continuous creation of positive externality for the whole.
In August 2022, a group of practitioners from the Web3 and community-building space, guided by principles of positive externality, openness, commons, and open source, gathered in Dali. Driven by a passion for technology, explorations of DAO governance and self-organization, long-term concern for public goods, and imagination for future social forms, they initiated “WAMO Summer | Dali Web3 Summer.”
This was a social experiment unfolding in the real world.
Under a shared consensus of decentralized co-creation, there was no single organizer and no main stage. Participants organized content, spaces, and actions through trust and initiative. The city itself became the medium — cafés, bars, street corners, and public spaces continuously transformed into theme camps, where ideas, technology, art, and ways of life intersected and evolved in motion.
WAMO Summer ultimately became a real-world validation of how decentralization can operate beyond the digital realm.
It demonstrated that even without strong centralized control, trust, consensus, and self-organization can sustain complex and vibrant collaboration networks.
Today, WAMO has transcended geography as both a method and a spirit, continuously reinterpreted across cities and cultures. From Dali in 2022 to Chiang Mai in 2023 and 2024, every year we gather Builders, Creators, Thinkers, and Dreamers from around the world in a real city to build a decentralized pop-up city — collaboratively practicing our vision of a decentralized social experiment.
We call this evolving practice Wamotopia — and we seek to expand the original experiment into a broader, more living reality.
First WAMO in 2022
As artificial intelligence accelerates, technology is reshaping society’s direction, cognitive structures, and even value judgments at unprecedented speed.
We often frame AI as a technological revolution, yet rarely pause to ask: