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This is the second installment of “It Started @ FEST”, a series showcasing the projects and initiatives that include FWB FEST as part of their lore. Innumerable magic happens in the woods of Idyllwild over three August days on the stunning Idyllwild Arts Academy campus. That magic has an undeniable ripple effect year round. 

Tickets for FEST24 are available now at an early bird price of 30%-off.

 to talk about the journey of Soulquest, a pop-up music collective that received 2nd place in Music in Optimism’s massive We <3 The Art competition. Less than a year ago, Soulquest was merely a party crowdfund.

This all started with a Party crowdfund and a vision. You wanted to 

, a collective of 90’s hip-hop and R&B legends recording at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village. The Soulquarians captured a moment in time, a specific place, and a particular scene. Fast forward to Summer 2023 and we now have a powerful set of emerging technologies that can create 

 moments in time, place, and scene. Tell us more about the initial insight that eventually led to Soulquest, an onchain pop-up music collective. 

In early 2023 I had an itch to work on something that combined my love of music with web3. I spent a lot of time talking to the pioneers who were experimenting with releasing their music onchain like Latashá, Black Dave, The Park, Songcamp etc. The common theme that emerged from these conversations was that people were desperately seeking online spaces where they could connect with likeminded people and collaborate on projects together. There was a lot of amazing infrastructure and tools for releasing music onchain but nothing that really helped artists and collectives grow and nurture a community. I started to explore the current suite of tools available for forming onchain collectives and decided to experiment with Nouns Builder and Party.

About a month before FEST23 the idea for Soulquest just kinda popped into my head. I was thinking about how so much of the incredible music I listen to and love was birthed out of collectives. The Wu Tang Clan, Odd Future, Native Tongues, . I had always been inspired by the legendary Soulquarians collective (Questlove, D’Angelo, Questlove, Erykah Badu, Mos Def and many others) and wanted to see if we could recreate that energy and experimental approach to making music, but do it in a really onchain way. I decided to launch a Party crowdfund and see if we could collectively form a hip-hop/neo-soul supergroup and send them to Fest to record and release a song.

. How did this group come together and what role did everyone play?

We raised 5 ETH and had 35 people contribute to the Soulquest crowdfund and initially the idea was that we’d let artists apply and the Party would decide on who made up the group. Very quickly we realized that wasn’t going to work and that it needed to be curated. On advice from Derek Taylor (of The Park) I reached out to Iman Europe and asked if she’d like to help curate the group with me. I mentioned I was keen to get V.C.R on board for her amazing vocals and was going to hit up some producers who had a real J Dilla / Q-tip vibe. Iman convinced V.C.R to get involved and decided she would also like to be an artist on the project. After a bit of back and forth trying to agree on a producer we reached out to Swarvy (who V.C.R had worked with before) and told him about the concept and Iman reached out to rapper Ill Camille. Finally we had our crew locked in and I was blown away by the caliber of artists we’d managed to assemble. Collectively they had collaborated with the likes of André 3000, Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Snoop Dogg, Kendrick Lamar, Dr. Dre, The Alchemist and more.

So far the story is inspiration >> idea >> resources >> artists. The next piece is the location. The group made the long, but stunning trip to Idyllwild, CA to create their first release as a collective. “Idyllic” was birthed and recorded onsite in The Park’s fully outfitted studio space at FEST23. Why did you 

choose FEST to play such a critical role in the Soulquest story

Choosing to do Soulquest at FEST23 just made a lot of sense to me. I had seen many musicians and creatives join FWB over the years and start to release their work onchain as they learned more about the technology and use-cases. I felt that by bringing a bunch of musicians who had no prior experience with web3 (with the exception of Iman) to an event like FEST, it might help them better understand the incredible tools that were being built and how they could leverage them in their own creative practice. My hope was that they’d see crypto/web3 as something more than just charts and speculation.

What did Soulquest show you about this kind of creative coordination? Said another way, what are some lessons or things that surprised you about the process?

I learned pretty quickly that strangers on the internet are happy to contribute money to a project they think is interesting or cool, but that doesn’t mean they’ll participate. It’s really hard to get people to vote, propose ideas and be part of a dialogue if there is no incentive to do so. In our case we decided that ~15% of any proceeds from the sale of NFTs (or the Optimism competition) would flow back to the crowdfund contributors so that helped motivate people a little but it still was surprising.It also highlighted the importance of getting buy-in and having a core group of people driving the project forward, rather than an individual. Most of the decision making was up to me, and even though I had hoped some of the crowdfund contributors might jump in to help coordinate things that didn’t end up happening. Creating the right guard rails and structure early on is super important.

One way to look at this is to say that Soulquest is an instance of emerging technology outputting the creation of culture IRL. This is core to our thesis at FWB – that culture will drive adoption of emerging technology in service of a better internet. What do you make of that? 

Our goal with Soulquest was to experiment with new models of collective collaboration to produce cultural artifacts that live forever, onchain. I believe that these new tools and technologies will be adopted in a very bottom-up, grassroots kind of way. It will be driven by individuals, collectives and communities who are looking for alternatives to the algorithms, feeds and zero-sum games that creators are forced to play.

What’s next for Soulquest? Will there be a FEST run back in 2024?

Well we don’t know yet, but I would really love to see Soulquest come back to FEST in 2024. We’ve been throwing some ideas around and I’ve proposed to the Party that we could use the 15% split from the Optimism competition to fund the next iteration of the project, whatever that may be

The next generation of music communities, labels and fan clubs will be onchain, and will make decisions collectively. If you’re interested in experimenting or want to collab hit me up.We also recently started a collective called Cheeks with the goal of curating a monthly club night in cities across the world and live streaming it to members. Right now it’s just a Telegram chat with ~90 people but the plan is to form an onchain collective that will fund the events and choose the acts that play. Stay tuned.

A better internet is one in which connection and collaboration are prioritized over scale and reach. It is an ecosystem of millions of niche micro-communities cross pollinating and thriving together.

Top vinyl records in my collection by Soulquarian members:

The WEIRDest People in the World by Joseph Henrich. It’s about how culture, rituals and institutions shaped the West’s psychology and contributed to its prosperity.

Recently I’ve been listening to a bunch of Acquired podcast eps. I really loved the one on Nintendo as it goes deep into their history before gaming. They were originally a concrete company and then manufactured playing cards for Yakuza run gambling parlors.

What are you obsessing over/can’t stop thinking about lately? 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of memecoins not as speculative assets but as a new curation primitive that can also help emerging artists make some extra money. The idea that you could start to form a social graph and highlight creative works based on the amount of onchain tips creators receive opens up a pretty vast design space.

Hearing the Soulquest tracks (they made three in 4 hours) played in full for the first time in front of the crowd that had gathered in the room. It was special.



We sat down with our friend iamnick.eth, founder Fam and instigator of Soulquest to talk about the project's journey from Party crowdfund to winner of Optimism's We <3 The Art. 

It Started @ FEST: Soulquest

 reflection on the success of FWB's decentralized events program

Everyone knows that bottlenecks are a vibe killer. When we began the FWB Cities program–since renamed the Event Keys program–in 2021, we had the wild ambition to kick off with a commitment to host three distinct events a month across the globe. That amounts to 36 individual global events annually produced by the core team and attended by a fully decentralized membership of internet friends and their friends, and their friend’s friends, and so on.

Los Angeles, London, and New York were our first activations under the new program, following the success of earlier events in Paris and Miami. We started in cities with the most engaged membership nodes with quick plans to scale. However confining creative direction and decision-making to FWB’s core team created an immediate bottleneck, not only impeding the nuanced process of event planning and securing talent but also (perversely) stifling our ability to move efficiently. Our centralization bottleneck was killing the vibe, inadvertently breaking the cardinal rule of events: don’t kill the vibe.

Our resolution? Implement a decentralization solution that would align our emerging technology philosophy with our cultural philosophy. The result is our Event Pattern Language.

This initiative not only democratized event organization within FWB but also set a precedent for how other decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) might scale their events and programming. Since we originally wrote Event Pattern Language in 2021, our Event Keys program has facilitated over 200 activations across the globe, with more in production.

We’re publishing our Event Pattern Language for the first time. This document has historically served as reference material for members applying to the Event Keys program, but we think this pattern language should be in the public domain. We’ve updated the patterns to reflect cultural evolutions and continued learning in the three years since its original writing. We hope it resonates, and we invite you to use this pattern language as a starting point for an event pattern language for your community. See you IRL, soon.

P.S. 

As FWB expands from URL into IRL, we need a cohesive and comprehensive language for event programming. Inspired by the seminal 70s text, 

, by Christopher Alexander, our goal is to build an Events Pattern Language to guide our decentralized event efforts with a global programming strategy that is both distinctly FWB and individualized by geography and place.

Pattern languages are repeatable and flexible coordination practices–or 

that inform design principles. The concept emerged in the 1970s and was popularized by architect Christopher Alexander, whose book 

 persists as an influential text. While the original application of pattern languages was within architectural and urban design practices, pattern languages are adaptable to various, specific design situations, including many contexts other than physical infrastructure.

Every society that is alive and whole has its own unique and distinct pattern language.

The essential feature of a pattern is that it forms the basis for a shared community agreement, allowing members to discuss, then build, while maintaining a level of coherence.

Patterns are repeatable actions that happen organically in response to space.

The accumulation of those actions form patterns that can be codified into shared language.

A pattern must characterize the problems it is meant to solve, the context or situation where these problems arise, and the conditions under which the proposed solutions can be recommended.

Often these problems arise from a conflict of different interests or "forces." A pattern emerges as a dialogue to balance the forces, leading to a decision.

Patterns are a snapshot in time and should be revisited to ensure cultural relevance.

A pattern language should make people feel human and alive.

A pattern language is an attempt to express the deeper wisdom of aliveness within a particular field of human endeavor. Through a set of interconnected patterns, we might experience a sense of wholeness, spirit, or grace that varies in form, but is precise and empirically verifiable.

FWB’s Event Pattern Language has four components:

FWB’s values should be felt, seen, and heard at every event. Treat an FWB event like a microcosm of our universe: it embodies what we collectively stand for when done well.

Whether intentionally or unintentionally, many “tech” events lean into stale norms, mainly heteronormative, which permeates the vibe from attendees to talent to the event space itself. This normativity often engenders a sense of exclusion or (worse) alienation for anybody who falls outside this demographic (most people.)

As an opinionated scene, our events should reflect the people, cultures, and tastes that make and keep our community trend-setting. Everyone should feel comfortable enough to connect to build a thriving, sustained community. Even when alone, a sense of ease must be the default.

Encourage kindness, prioritize consent and accessibility, and maintain zero-tolerance for harassment of any kind to create a safe space for everyone.

. These are the backbone of our community, and we adhere to them at all times.

Publish event descriptions and materials in multiple languages when relevant.

Peak event programming demonstrates a curated point of view that signals 

 we value. It tells the story of where we are situated, highlights our values and community, and showcases our cultural partners whenever applicable. We believe that events, big or small, can be transformative experiences that bring people together so go 

. There will always be someone who appreciates it.

It’s an honor to book and work with talent. Event producers must respect and protect talent’s time, energy, and vision to receive their work's truest, undiluted versions. This is especially true for FWB, where many creatives first experience our community by participating in an event.

 to its specificity. Programming can’t exist in isolation or it runs the risk of being wholly out of touch or irrelevant. It must be knowingly impacted by and adapt to its cultural, social, and geographic context. By embracing this reality, event producers create experiences that resonate, drive connection and retention, and feel valuable.

Money is good; access is better. Too often, event producers spend large sums of money, thinking that the biggest names in the shiniest venue make an event stand out. 

 that carries some cultural weight, but more often than not, it does not successfully differentiate itself or present an authentic point of view.

The best opportunities come to event producers with hard work, rigorous planning, and good timing. Leave room for magic by staying organized and prepared enough to get lucky at the last moment.

Scaling events is not for the faint of heart. Whether launching a one-off or a series, event producers are responsible for programmatic cohesion, experiential consistency, and community alignment. It’s a gentle balance to uphold quality while reducing the blockers a centralized decision-making process creates. We encourage event producers to imagine their ideal event series endpoint for a holistic perspective on how to approach building an overarching theme or narrative.

Reflect the world we live in and want to flourish through the diversity of talent and guests across all forms of identity.

Engage local stakeholders, partners, organizations, and community leaders whenever possible.

Account for cultural and dietary restrictions or considerations whenever food is involved. No one should feel that their food preferences are secondary.

Avoid the lowest common denominator; inspire joy and confidence with rigor, nuance, and value.

Create relevant printed materials (i.e., menus, schedule, playlists) to which attendees can refer and keep as a souvenir.

Provide talent with a giveaway or small token of appreciation, and always pay on time.

Build unstructured time after a focal point for guests to mingle and reflect.

 space sets the stage for connection. It’s easy to overlook how much consideration choosing a space requires and even easier to fall into the trap of selecting a venue and neighborhood based entirely on convenience and popularity. All cities have culturally rich, hidden gems and lesser-known hotspots beyond the well-worn, tried and tested haunts.

, a venue or event space’s core capacities and staff 

 support Value Patterns and Programming Patterns.

Ensure that event host(s) and staff are reasonably visible and available, providing hospitality that aligns with the event’s context.

Consider, adjust, and signal the constraints and limitations of an event space to ensure all attendees can meet basic biological and safety needs.

Accessibility of the event via public transportation

Reasonable accommodations for visible and non-visible disabilities or impairments

Door staff, security, and bar staff knowledge equipped for emergencies or conflict

Choose spaces that elevate the programming content and context.

Lectures must have good sightlines, comfortable seating, and a sound system that ensures the audience can hear without straining.

Culinary events must be presented in clean spaces with plenty of room for people to enjoy their food and each other.

 to know everyone. IYKYK. Good guest curation and a thoughtful RSVP experience have the potential to satisfy our desire for a sense of belonging and recognition. Event producers should review the guestlist in real-time before the event and consider the kinds of conversations, connections, and glances afforded by who's there.

Transitioning from IRL to URL experiences is crucial to deepen bonds, inspire new connections, drive engagement, and build momentum for future events. Event producers should focus on creating opportunities with just enough friction for new and old faces to connect authentically.

For crypto-native communities like FWB, event producers are encouraged to leverage non/fungible tokens and pull on the thread that inherently ties holders together. Don't forget to throw in some added 

Inject enough magic and detail into the event flyer and description to entice guests.

Indicate the location clearly or share the location on time for a secret path.

Send reminders proactively before the event and a thank you note afterward.

Ensure a token-gated RSVP works correctly 

Save guest list spots for local organizations, event partners, and notable tastemakers to share with their network and communities.

Triple-check that your VIPs and their +1s are 

Hire a door person who (seemingly) knows everyone and the space well.

Event Pattern Language 2.0 – 2024 Release

All-Purpose Blueprint on How to Build a Vibe

David Blumenstein is a senior service designer in Melbourne, Australia. He's also an award winning cartoonist and graphic reporter for outlets like 

, Australia’s first open comics studio. He's currently deputy president of the Australian Cartoonists Association. Find his work at

Read “Octane Render,” a non-fiction comic by David Blumenstein. 

Fri Mar 24 2023

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