MetaCamp Community Bot

MetaCamp, a vacation retreat and workshop program for founders, has an unusual operating problem: an intense, temporary community whose value depends on people finding each other, contributing, and knowing what is happening, all within a few weeks and without a staff large enough to coordinate it by hand.

I built the program a community platform to carry that load. The interface was a Telegram bot, because the community already lived there, and behind it sat a serverless AWS architecture: the bot framework made authenticated API calls into services handling scheduling, announcements, and information gathering, with nothing running when nothing was happening.

Three features did the work. A points system rewarded community contribution, giving visible credit to the people who answered questions, ran sessions, and helped newcomers. A shared calendar kept the event schedule in one place that everyone’s chat client could reach. And a proxied request channel let attendees raise needs with the program directors through the bot, which meant requests arrived structured and nothing depended on catching the right person at dinner.

The engagement ran six weeks, ending June 12, 2024. The camp itself lasted two weeks, and the bot stayed in service for four more, carrying the community’s momentum past the event, which is where tools like this usually go quiet. By the end, the program rated the platform highly for exactly the outcomes it was built for: community cohesion and the timely spread of information.

This was one of a small cluster of community-tooling engagements, alongside a community NFT proof of concept for MetaCamp and a further client project that remains private. The most public of them, built on the same serverless pattern for a developer conference in Kenya, has its own entry.