tenet

​An open collective of makers, artists, engineers, researchers, designers, writers, poets, and everything in-between. Come to atrai to work on passion projects (literally anything you want).

​​Who

​​Anyone who has a passion project to work on! You're welcome even if you don't consider yourself a "creator", are awkward (we are too!), or aren't sure what you'll be working on yet.

​​What

​​Your passion project can be anything — something you want to code, design, read, write, or build with your own two hands. Just make sure it's something you're genuinely excited about outside of university societies and degree work.

​​Shallow Why

​​The vibes are sure to be immaculate, so hopefully you'll make friends with other fun and interesting people. It's a fun, productive environment to stop procrastinating over your passion project!

Deeper Why

Great creative work is historically done together, across backgrounds and disciplines, in small, high trust groups. This is the foundation of boundary pushing work - in engineering, science, art, and more.

On top of that... there are increasingly few, low stakes ways for people to make interest, values aligned friends IRL. This is made worse by an endless stream of catered consumption.

It becomes pretty clear that we should do two things: gather and create. Atrai aims to help people do both.

How

Introductions, two hour-long work blocks, ending with casual open demos.

letter 01

  “Yes, wonderful things.” — Howard Carter when asked if he saw anything, upon

his first glimpse into the tomb of Tutankhamun.

after 23 atrais, i have some realizations.

• when atrai works, it is incredibly fun and cool and awesome and everything superlative.
• it really is a special space with potential supremely wonderful.
• often it does not work.

• heres the thing – atrai is not just a friends hangout.

• atrai is about celebrating making stuff.

• we have not been particularly good at managing crowd and enforcing the very structures that make atrai – initiating, ensuring locking-in, sharing the work, etc.

• and this directly affects the atrai experience negatively for the people who show up.

• atrai should have a structure and it should enforce it.

• if we want to preserve this beautiful growing garden that is atrai, there are things we must do, because the default fate of communities is death.

• from: most communities silently shutdown painfully, almost never because the value was unclear and the demand was dying down, but because bts the communities were propped up by two people, a half-used roll of tape and a dream.
• here’s a rundown of what typically happens.

• for a time things work really well! these are the glory days.
• The community grows and grows. and grows… and grows? with more attention and success, everyone rushes to be a part of it. being a part of it is “the cool thing to do”. fomo is incredible.
• tasks become repetitive, monotonous, and stale. Work stops being exciting, organizers feel overwhelmed. The founding group loses interest, the sparkle dies.
• tasks are delegated, and in a last-ditch effort to save the sinking ship, new leadership comes in. In most cases (other than the rare case of someone truly special making it “the cool thing to do” again), the organization rides out its reputation, diluted to a shadow of what it once was, until it fizzles and ceases to exist.
• the cycle repeats.

• the communities that avoid death, they do so by very deliberate succession planning and sharing the act of making. making it together.
• before discussing what we need to do, here’s a dump about atrai the concept.

• dhaka is so big a city and yet so few things to do, people are lonely.
• we want to meet all the cool and great people in dhaka.
• dhaka should have something like atrai.
• great creative work is historically done together(shoutout homebrew computer club); most people are lonely and alone and dont feel a sense of belonging, especially in this hyper online world. we should gather and create. atrai aims to do both.
• atrai wants to be as simple as possible.
• atrai wants to be run as simply as possible, zero bikeshedding. we don’t want to do anything that we don’t want to do. only do meaningful work, don’t have dumb rules.
• people will join atrai, play their part, and leave. atrai is a vehicle, there is no permanence.
• making stuff is fundamental, atrai wants to celebrate making stuff and doing cool things.
• atrai does not have a grand goal or narrative – it really is just gather and create – what comes out of that is a pleasant surprise. that being said, there’s no reason atrai should not aim to become the coolest community at scale in dhaka!
• atrai above all, should be fun. otherwise, what are we even doing?
• atrai should focus very deliberately on succession planning and passing it off and making it together. it should be a red herring if the same group of people are hosting it for more than 6 months and at maximum a year. hosts must move to mentorship roles and cultivate new hosts.
• the hosts enjoy the overwhelming benefits of connecting people.
• every single person in the room is there, because they want to be there.
• fomo is good.
• there is no us and them, everyone is a host.
• design escalation paths for people to level-up.
• atrai is an exercise in ultimate anti-gatekeeping. atrai is not an exclusive gated cult, everyone is welcome if they want to make cool things and meet cool people.
• play the long game.
• on preserving the quality of community at scale – again, against gatekeeping. there is no us and them. communities don’t die at scale when you “dilute all the good people”, they die when you stop believing in levelling-up the people.
• atrai wants to leverage the community to build the community.
• celebrate people.
• celebrate making stuff.
• go out of your way to help people.
• care about taste.
• make wonderful things.
• celebrate curiosity and ambition.
• there is magic in meeting irl.
• we are awkward too.
• atrai was created because we thought dhaka must’ve got so many interesting people, we want to meet them.
• hate loneliness. atrai was created because of loneliness.
• help hosts however you can.
• it’s not that deep.
• great people know great people.
• the common point is making.
• we started atrai because we wished something like this existed in dhaka.
• the job is vibe curation.
• the only constant is change.
• great people are right in front of you. all of these is plainly stupid if you don’t believe in that, an exercise in faith.
• be the light you wish to see in the world.
• what if there was a place?
• free to do what you think would be cool, most minimal baggage.
• each rendezvous is a flower, atrai is a garden.
• we will make mistakes.
• tolerating is precisely being annoyed and yet tolerating. if it’s not painful, you’re not tolerating.
• in general, don’t give energy to ugly things, bring beautiful things to light. looking away shall be your only negation.
• you can just do things.
• bring your friends to atrai.
• take ownership.
• almost always you start something for selfish reasons and once it grows, you do it because of things greater than just you.

• great. now let’s discuss what we need to do.

• help. in any way. if you always wanted to be part of something like atrai, get out of that shyness!
• the thing to realize is that, it is not a ship and some people are running it. everyone is a host. you are welcome.
  

lot of this is from: https://boxx.substack.com/p/world-building-irl

shoutout to audri, suha, inan, tahmid, rahik, raiyan, anannya, and aalok. and ofc, everyone.

next up we need to figure out how you can help, and then what does a host need to do – an atrai handbook.