How To Semi-Nomad

Back in February 2024 I reached out to Daneel and Ani with a proposal to test our collaboration. Eight months later we concluded a month long mastermind bringing together 14 people to write the first book about semi-nomadism, build friendships, and create a community driven publishing studio.

TLDR: The book is now done and the mastermind worked so well that we’re having another one in April 2025 (more info at the end).

How To Semi-Nomad Book Cover

Here’s the retrospective from the mastermind starting with a 55 seconds video:

(click this link if the video doesn’t load.)

Why Spend A Month Co-Writing A Book?

Brining people for long enough in-real-life spaces to create something together is my ikigai.

Allow me to dissect:

1. Long Enough

Relationships grow at the speed of trust, and a few days is simply too short to go deep enough and ground the emerging connection with a solid foundation for a lasting friendship. Sure, you can amplify depth and bonding with facilitation tricks and make people feel super connected over a weekend, but the real good stuff takes time.

Graph visualising short vs long container

Living together for a month feels like being a part of an established ecosystem. There are routines, rituals, ongoing conversations, and evolving building blocks of culture shaped together by a group. Most importantly - there’s plenty of time to get to know each other, while resting well, and continuously integrating the experience.

Cards with culture puzzles

📸 Taking time to explore the absolutely stunning nature, with hundreds of kilometers of hikes starting right at our doorstep.

Speaking of continuous integration – you’re quite unlikely to hit pause on everything else happening in your life for an entire month, which naturally weaves your inside-the-container experience with everything outside of it. There is no separation.

2. In Real Life

Ya, ya, enough zoom calls, thank you. IRL is more effective, more fun, more human. And hey, I’d choose being with you in person rather than on screen every time. And if we have an entire month together, then wow, I really can’t wait!

People cosy together on sofas

📸 Exploring the space during one of the open space workshops.

3. Creating Together

There’s nothing quite like getting to know a person through collaborating with them. Hanging out in an unstructured open space is fantastic, and yet, setting a direction of creating a tangible deliverable within the time time together is a game-changer. The delightful clash of ideas, communication styles, working approaches, personal focus areas, and fluctuating energy levels reveals potential matches for a long-term friendship and/or collaboration, and creates a feeling of a shared group identity anchored in the lived experience and in the physical artefact.

Facilitators with the artefact and the process

In our case we wrote a freaking 190-page book in one month. It is a journey to remember and be proud of.

“I found belonging in ways I have not expected.”
– Serge

Container Design

Our first book-writing prototype hosted at the Traditional Dream Factory in 2022 lasted 11 days and gathered 28 people. Together with my co-facilitator Daneel we prototyped everything from scratch in real time. Our energy was relentless. We finished the mastermind with a completed pdf of “How To Build A Regenerative Village” and Treehouse DAO - an idea for a publisher. While the process worked well, we didn’t have enough space and capacity for tying loose ends, which resulted in two critical flaws:

  1. We didn’t plan for editing and post-production.
  2. We didn’t have clear agreements for decision making and financial flows.

Womp womp.

The result was a two year process to complete the last 5% needed to print the book. Learning from that experience, we reshaped the process completely, arriving at what seems to be a replicable month-long book writing container that kicks ass.

Here’s how it works.

How We Made A Book In 55 Hours 😎

55 hours?

We spent one month together but the actual book-making sessions lasted 3 hours x 5 days per week x 3 weeks = 45 hours total. Let’s add another 10 hours to account for the extra push on the last days and we’ll get somewhere close to 55 hours for a 190-page book.

THIS IS INSANE.

Of course, sprinting for 55 hours straight wouldn’t work. To make it possible we needed to make time for creating group coherence, rest, subconscious processing and all the other good stuff on the community side of things.

The result was the following plan:

Container design

Week one focused on community weaving and creative foreplay.

Cards with culture puzzles

📸 A few pieces of our culture puzzle.

Something we haven’t planned was that many of us came to the mastermind with a personal sub-quest of stepping up their exercise routine. As a result most of us got a monthly pass to the local sport centre and started a daily mix of squash, swim, iceskating, archery and gym. Combined with the sauna we had at home, it kept our bodies in a fantastic shape throughout the month and provided a critical off-switch for the brainz 🧠.

Archery class

📸 That delightful day when we did an archery class together.

Week two is when we started to make pages.

A scan from our log depicting our daily process

📸 Sneak peek into our log containing the historical picture of the very first card played during the mastermind

At the end of week three we showcased the book to the public.

Printed book on the wall

📸 It’s quite a sight to witness all of the pages printed for the first time.

On a community-building note, week three became “the dating week”. The well-established group coherence naturally shifted the attention towards intentional 1:1s and deepening individual bonds. This is where long-term collaborations started to reveal themselves.

Three people walking together

📸 That’s a pic of a trio date, but you get the idea 😉.

Week four is when we finished the book. It was intense. The time pressure finally kicked in hard, both on completing the book and deepening the relationships.

Book front and back cover

That’s it. The book is done and available to order.

The last step is the final day of rest and departures.

A cuddle puddle after closing ceremony

📸 One of the best live feedback was the cuddle puddle after the closing ceremony resulting in falling asleep together. It warms my heart to witness such a degree of comfort and proximity.

Zooming In On Daily Routine

Our working days started at 09h55 with a round of check-ins followed by Decentralised Needs Meeting and Open Space. We deliberately set the start time quite late to give people time to have an unrushed morning routine, breakfast, and for these early risers have some focused time for getting some personal work done.

Decentralised Needs Meeting served as a space for anyone to express any need they might have without the pressure on the collective to meet the need. The objective is two-fold: a) practice verbalising needs b) increase chances of getting them met. After all, how can I know you need a massage if you keep it a secret?

Open Space is a collective practice of coordinating activities for the day. Anyone could propose any activity to happen in any time outside of the 3 hour book making session.

Here are a few examples to showcase the variety:

If you’re not familiar with Open Space, have a look here.

Morning session vibes

📸 The delightful vibe of our morning moment together.

After the moment of creating a daily group coherence and planning the day we jumped into 3 hours of book creation playtime (more on that later).

Next, we’d float into lunch served by our amazing chef Josefina.

Food pic. Yes, it looks super tasty

📸 A food pic for your delight.

Afternoon varied from day to day depending on open space offerings, but usually included a session of squash or other physical activity, before coming back together again for dinner prepped by daily rotating teams.

Evenings depended on open space, and usually the day ended with someone turning on the sauna 🔥. And then, half way through the mastermind, we discovered that sauna in the morning is an amazing way to start the day. We also discovered that quite a few of us were waking up very early which kickstarted our 5am/6am/7am club.

Ticking boxes

📸 Here’s the boxes representing images to make. Our illustrator Tess is smashing it from the early morning 🎨.

That’s it for work days.

On the first day of the weekend people tended to disappear into their own recharge modes. The house felt super quiet and cozy.

Deep rest time

📸 A well deserved moment of ultimate chill. Bonus points for the hat!

On the second day the energy was back and we’d go for a hike, or just hang out in nature. This is also when many great creative ideas for the book sparked and we begun our famous balcony sessions.

Balcony vibes

📸 The vibe is always excellent on the balcony.

“I could do these masterminds all of my life.“
– Ani

Zooming in on 3h Creative Sprints

The book was done in dedicated 3 hour sessions. No AI, just the limitless human creativity in flowstate with cards as a primary medium.

The process goes through stages of free-flow brainstorming and sense-making, constrained by the format of book pages, which keeps the group focused and effective. In the meantime, our illustrator keeps on drawing.

The speed is incredible. Our daily record was 51 pages!

Playing with cards

📸 The daily process of cardification.

The most important part is, of course, the vibe. We are able to co-create so effectively because we’re in a constant state of play with the group quickly learning how to self-facilitate and adjust the process to match the energy in the room.

The result is a beautiful illustrated book.

“It was such a creative process. I’m proud to be behind this book!”*
– Yoav

Why Semi-Nomadism?

I’ve started this article with the process, because (in my opinion) the process makes 65% of the mastermind experience. On the other hand, the book is the focusing point for the month and the reason why we came together.

We picked the topic of semi-nomadism because it feels relevant and fascinating to explore.

The (digital) nomad lifestyle is by now quite well established in the global awareness, with a plenty of people living this way and plenty of resources and services catering to their needs. In the same time I keep noticing a growing need for stability and roots. I feel it myself - traveling is fantastic, but being constantly on the move doesn’t fulfil me anymore. I wish to have a base (or a few bases) to come back to, and see their growth over a longer period of time, while growing myself shaped by it. This mutual shaping - of a place by the person, and of a person by the place became a somewhat of a guiding definition for what a semi-nomad actually is.

Page preview

📸 Preview of the book pages.

The word semi-nomad itself was fascinating to dissect.

After all the prefix semi indicates being “partly something”, so being “not quite nomadic”. While accurate to a degree, we felt that it puts too much emphasis on the nomadic aspect, while the key piece of the puzzle for us was the aspect of having a home, or multiple homes.

We explored alternative word choices (such as homad and rooted nomad), but in the end decided to stay with semi-nomad, as a good enough and safe enough. Our fired brains produced a wonderful poem though:

Semi Nomad Poem

📸 It was fun to read it out loud during dinner.

If you have better words to describe the phenomena, you can contribute to the conversation on polis and telegram.

The definition was one of many rabbit holes we embarked upon. The book is a snapshot of our collective exploration of the subject through multiple lenses, such as self, relationships, practical life-admin stuff (hooray tax and health insurance) and offers a collection of perspectives to consider when choosing to build a semi-nomadic lifestyle.

Here are a few pages to look at:

Page preview

Page preview

Page preview

I mentioned already the feeling of shared identity stemming from creating a tangible deliverable together. I can’t wait to see the smile on authors faces when they will hold the physical print in their hands for the first time.

There’s also something around the medium of a book itself that is particularly appealing. A book is a book. It is a format well recognised by both the mainstream and alternative pockets of cultural landscape and it carries a degree of seriousness and respectability that can transmit the ideas into the wider ecosystem.

After all, we’re writing about topics within the wide ranging spectrum of regeneration, community and culture, with the intention of inspiring others to co-create a world where all beings can thrive.

“I’m leaving with more than just filled pages. I carry with me a renewed sense of my worth, a strength that comes from a community with shared alignment, and a desire to infuse more magic into every moment..”*
– Lucile

Our Community Driven Publishing Studio

Tree House Collective Cover Image

Tree House Collective is a community-driven publishing studio. By humans, for humans.

We specialise in creating tangible deliverables and building friendships during In-Real-Life masterminds harnessing the power of play and creativity. Our books are co-created by communities, offering real insights into regenerative living.

The profits are redistributed into the community of authors incentivising supporting books created within the ecosystem and enabling scholarships and community innovation.

In other words:

  1. Join a mastermind
  2. Make a book and make impact
  3. Make friends
  4. Get your money back through book sales
  5. Support the community

Tree House Collective Model Graph

Tree House Collective Model Graph

As a community driven publisher we are very excited about experimenting with alternative approaches to marketing - focusing on human-to-human interactions IRL rather than digital ads.

We’ll be hosting another mastermind in April in Switzerland and then in the fall 2025 in Mexico, and you can express your interest by joining this telegram group.

You can also hire our services for your organisation. Reach out to discuss what would you like to create with your team. It’s worth noting that while we’re starting with books, we’re already looking into building games and software using the same methodology.

Daneel and Michał

📸 We’re on it.

Mastermind KPIs

That was all great, but (at least some of) you probably want stats.

Here are a few:

Chilling after smashing the book

📸 Chilling on a sunny day after the work/play is done.


“Gratitude and bliss are my two keywords.”*
– Bige

There’s also metrics that are harder to quantify such as:

Future metrics to track (note to self):

Improvements Braindump

While the process flew extremely well there is definitely space for improvements. Here are a few ideas.

Personal Learnings

Next Steps

We’re now collecting pre-orders to fund the first print run. We expect to ship in November/December 2024. The next (mega) milestone is to sell ~5000 copies to pay authors back before the next mastermind in April 2025.

You can order your copy here and this would make a tremendous difference for us!

Authors

📸 So many smiling faces send good vibes your way!.

In the meantime we’re setting up Tree House Collective as a legal entity.

Finally, we’re inviting people for the next mastermind in our epic venue Vermont Hub, Swizerland in April 2025 and then in Mexico in the fall 2025. Join this telegram group or reach out to me directly to create the next book with us.

You can also hire us to deliver a mastermind (or a mini-mastermind) in your organisation. Contact me directly to discuss your needs.

If you want to follow my personal journey I invite you to read my Moonly Reviews, peak into my microblog on telegram, or interact with me on twitter.

And if you want to get my support in designing your own kick-ass container, then you can book me for a 1:1.

Have a wonderful Day,
Michał

· facilitation, community · projects