Democratizing Science at Edge City

At Edge City, our popup villages function as living labs. Across our gatherings, residents run experiments in everything from new governance models, to community sleep data aggregation, to longevity protocols and consciousness research. The missing piece is often the same: how do you actually measure whether something works?

That’s why we’re excited to announce a partnership with Alethios, a platform that makes it easy for anyone to design and run structured, real-world studies. Through this collaboration, all Edge City participants - residents, fellows, and curious attendees - will get free access to the Alethios Study Planner to design and operate studies at our villages as well as on-the-ground support to transform ideas into research.

Why this matters

When someone runs a week-long breathwork experiment, tests a new sleep protocol, or explores the effects of a community practice on wellbeing, we want them to be able to collect real data and draw meaningful conclusions. Until now, most of that knowledge has stayed at the level of anecdotes.

Alethios makes this accessible. You don’t need a lab, an institutional affiliation, or an enterprise budget. You can design a study, set up a participant-facing app (mobile and web-based), and integrate data from surveys, wearables, cognitive assessments, and optional biomarker collection - all in one platform. Their team also supports ethics committee (IRB) submissions and compliance in the United States.

What this looks like in practice

Imagine you’re at one of our popup villages and you want to test whether a daily cold plunge routine affects cognitive performance over two weeks. Or whether a particular co-living arrangement leads to higher self-reported wellbeing. Or whether a meditation protocol changes biomarkers in a measurable way.

With Alethios, you can design that study in days, not months. You can recruit participants from the village, set up clear schedules and tasks for them, and collect high-quality data - all while fitting naturally into the rhythms of community life.

This is the kind of infrastructure that lets us move from “I think this worked for me” to “here’s what the data shows, and here’s who it worked for”.

A natural fit

Alethios’ mission to democratize research aligns closely with how we think about experimentation. Our villages bring together people with questions worth investigating with rigor, and now they have a real tool to do it. We’re hoping this partnership leads to publishable findings from our villages, peer-reviewed research that started as a conversation over dinner at a popup.

Get started

The partnership includes free access to the Alethios Study Planner for all Edge City participants. If you’re attending one of our upcoming villages and have a research question you’d like to explore, visit the Alethios Study Planner and use code EDGE-CITY at signup.

Have questions about designing a study for an upcoming village? Reach out to us at info@edgecity.live. Ready to run your own experiment? Tickets are on sale now, and prices increase regularly. We recommend getting your ticket early (you can switch weeks if you’re unsure when you’d like to come).

Alethios is a software platform building infrastructure for decentralized human health research. Founded in 2023, Alethios enables both expert and non-traditional research teams to design and run structured studies using integrated self-reported outcomes, wearable data, and at-home biomarker testing.

Edge City creates popup villages around the world that convene people working at the frontiers of tech, science, and society. Our mission is to act as a ‘society incubator’: a living lab to experiment with new ideas, technologies, cultures, and organizations, all with the goal of advancing human flourishing.

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