Emergence

What is Emergence and what is it for?

Emergence is a Holochain app for coordinating events such as open-space gatherings and conferences, where the schedule is assembled by the people attending. Participants propose sessions, browse what is on and keep shared notes, with each person's app joining a peer-to-peer network rather than a central server.

The Holochain blog's account of the app's first outing starts in March 2023, when the Holochain project was talking with DWeb Camp about sponsorship and offered to build something simple for note-taking and community connection. That idea grew into coordinating a day of open-space sessions called Tomorrow, where camp participants would propose sessions and choose their spaces through the app while access to the wider internet was switched off.

Emergence is an app for running an event whose schedule comes together from the people at it. Participants propose sessions, browse what is on and keep notes they share with each other, and each person's app joins a peer-to-peer network rather than a central server. A copy of the app's network can be created for a particular event and shared with others through a joining code, so a gathering can run on its own. The repository sums the work up as a Holochain app for distributed event coordination.

At DWeb Camp 2023 the app was used for note-taking and sensemaking across the camp, after the camp team had decided to keep the day's session scheduling on an analog process. The repository README holds the developer workflow, from running two nodes and bootstrapping a network to packaging the web app, and the Holochain blog's case study is the fullest published account of the project's origin and its first live use.

From 4 public sources, checked 23 September 2026.