Participation and Consent Brief

What the Agent Village is

The Agent Village is a research experiment in how people and AI agents work together, run during Edge Esmeralda 2026, a month-long in-person village in Healdsburg, California (May 30 to June 27, 2026). If you are attending, you can set up a personal AI agent that lives in Telegram and helps you navigate the village, find people worth meeting, and take part in community experiments. It is run by Edge City, with research partners and funders.

Ethics review

This experiment has not been reviewed by an institutional review board or a formal ethics body. It is an independent research effort. Taking part is voluntary, and you can stop at any time.

What your agent does with your information

• It reads your EdgeOS profile (your name, the email you applied with, your interests and goals, the dates you are attending, and similar details) so it has context.
• It keeps a memory of your conversations and preferences as files on the runtime your agent uses. On the default setup, that runtime is hosted by Edge City.
• It works with Index to find people worth connecting you with. To do this, your profile, your stated interests, and your contact handle are stored with Index so people you match with can reach you. Suggestions come to you through your agent, and you approve before it acts on a connection.
• It can add to Geo, the shared community knowledge graph, when you ask it to share something there.

A note on Geo: when you ask your agent to share something to Geo, it publishes right away to a public graph, with no separate confirmation step. Treat anything it adds there as public, and be deliberate about what you ask it to share.

Treat your agent as part of an experiment

Your agent runs on AI models and connected systems that are new and still being tested. It can be wrong, and the experiment can change or pause. The Agent Village is a hosted service: like other online services you use, it runs on infrastructure we operate, so the people running it (Edge City staff and designated research personnel) can access what you send your agent. Your messages are also processed by outside AI providers to generate replies, and the Privacy Notice lists everyone who handles your data. We use your information only to run the Agent Village and for the research described here, and taking part means trusting us to handle it responsibly. We cannot make your messages technically private from us, so please do not share anything with your agent that you would not want studied or seen, and do not rely on it for anything important without checking it yourself. If you join an Agent Village group chat on Telegram, treat it as public, because messages there are recorded for research.

The research data

We study how agents are used across the village, and we intend to publish what we learn as open research, on our own and with research partners. Published material can include examples and patterns drawn from activity in the experiment. We aim to avoid attaching your name to it, but we cannot promise that published material could never be traced back to you, and we do not claim it is anonymous. We do not remove identifying details from the raw data behind these findings. This is why the point above matters: treat your agent as part of a research experiment.

Your choices

• Taking part is voluntary. You can decline any suggestion your agent makes.
• You can wipe your agent's memory at any time with a self-reset.
• You can stop taking part at any time. Tell us and we stop collecting new data and delete your agent's memory. Anything already published as research, or already shared with research partners, may remain.
• You can ask us what data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Contact hello@edgecity.live.

Who can take part

You must be 18 or older to set up an agent, and we rely on your Edge Esmeralda 2026 application for age. The Agent Village is not for anyone under 18.

How your consent is recorded

When you set up your agent, we record that action with a timestamp as your agreement, and we keep a copy of this brief as it read at that time.

Who runs this and how to reach us

Edge Institute, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, runs the Agent Village. For questions about the research or your participation, contact hello@edgecity.live, or raise it in the Agent Village Telegram group. This brief works alongside the Privacy Notice and the Terms of Use.

By setting up your agent, you confirm that you have read this brief and agree to take part.