Edge City Lanna: Personal data, collective connection

In an era where social media apps are centered around public feeds, we face a paradox: How do we foster authentic relationships while protecting personal boundaries? This fall, my colleagues and I explored this question at Edge City's pop-up community in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where we deployed Cursive Connections – an app designed to help people connect meaningfully without sacrificing privacy.

Edge City's thoughtfully designed community space

Cursive Connections operates on a simple principle: your data belongs to you. Here's how it works:

• Users store their personal data privately and securely in their browser, with encrypted backups
• Residents collect contact cards by tapping their phone to someone's NFC wristband
• Using cryptography (specifically Fully Homomorphic Encryption and 2-Party Computation), the app identifies potential connections by finding intersections in private data – without ever decrypting anyone's information

A resident connecting in the Cursive app with another resident by tapping their wristband

The Edge City community provided the perfect testing ground. Their thoughtfully designed space, with its central co-working hub, workout rooms, and café, created constant opportunities for serendipitous encounters. The NFC wristbands became visible markers of community membership, encouraging residents to strike up conversations and exchange contact information.

Our initial focus was straightforward: connect people with shared interests and goals. But a meeting with Timber, a resident hosting daily discussion circles, sparked a new direction. What he called the "tensions game" – designed to sharpen critical thinking through structured dialogue – inspired us to think differently about connection.

The tensions game in action

During an impromptu brainstorming session, we wondered: What if we could help people connect not just through similarities, but through thoughtfully explored differences? We developed a feature allowing residents to privately record their views on various tensions – from "open vs. closed communities" to "first principles vs. mythological thinking." Instead of broadcasting opinions publicly, users could choose when and with whom to explore their differences.

Two residents comparing where they fall on different tensions

During our month-long residency, we tested several other features:

• Emotion-based matching at social events (connecting people who were feeling anxious, excited, etc.)
• Activity and interest-based pairing
• Opt-in to discover shared contacts
• Anonymous contributions to community wellness and productivity goals

The community dashboard emerged as a particularly successful experiment. Event organizers could track community engagement and achievement without requiring individual data exposure – demonstrating how privacy-preserving technology could enhance rather than inhibit community connection. Residents anonymously contributed their Strava activities and class check-ins to community wellness goals, while developers shared their Github commits toward collective productivity goals.

Community dashboard showing anonymous contributions to wellness goals

Edge City's success in fostering meaningful connections highlighted something crucial: environment matters. Their carefully curated community created a foundation of psychological safety, making it possible for residents to explore differences with mutual respect and genuine curiosity.

This mirrors how connections form naturally: through trusted introductions or serendipitous encounters. For instance, I met Timber through Janine, another organizer who recognized potential overlap in our work. This raised an intriguing question: Could we scale these dynamics of trust and serendipity while preserving privacy?

When Janine introduced me to Timber, she was acting as a bridge - she understood our shared interests in community building and technology. We're designing Cursive Connections to play a similar role, but with additional privacy affordances. The app acts as a curator, using MPC to recognize potential connections while keeping everyone's data private.

Collecting a new contact by tapping Jack's ring

When two people tap their phones to each other's Cursive chip, they're not just exchanging contact information – they are adding each other to their private social graphs. Later, if someone is looking for someone else who wants to grab breakfast, or wants to find a collaborator, they will be able to narrowcast their intention and the app will privately identify matches within their graph of trusted connections.

They might discover that someone two degrees away has attended the same pop up cities and is also looking for a collaborator to work on similar frontier technology - without broadcasting their interests or affiliations publicly! Alternatively, they might be notified of a promising connection between two of their contacts - even without seeing their data. We could see more serendipitous connections in networks we trust while everyone maintains control over when and with whom they share their private data.

Visualization of private set intersection in action

This approach represents a fundamental shift in how social technology can work. At Cursive, we're building an alternative to the apps that sacrifice our privacy for profit while failing to deliver meaningful connections. We believe meaningful connections don't require surrendering data to companies or advertisers. By working with aligned partners like Edge City, we're demonstrating that privacy-first technology and open-source cryptography can enhance rather than hinder community building.

When people own their data and choose how to share it, they engage more meaningfully with their community. Edge City's residents did more than just test our app — they helped us reimagine how technology can serve human connection while respecting personal boundaries.