Thirty people walked into White Rabbit on a Saturday morning and left a day later with a dozen working software tools that address a problem this valley has been talking about for decades.
Jim Flint wrote a thorough account of Rogue Raise for Ashland.news. I'd encourage you to read it. What follows is my perspective on what we learned and where it goes from here.
What we set out to do
The premise was simple: take the creative and technical energy that's been building in our Monday night AI Builders Lab at White Rabbit and point it at a problem the community actually needs solved. Wildfire resilience became our target Not because it's easy, but because fire season doesn't wait for committees to finish deliberating. And because we had the incredible work of a world-class fire preparedness expert, Charisse Sydoriak, to build upon.
We called it a "Rogue Raise" because the barn-raising metaphor felt more apt than "hackathon." We wanted the community to be both the builder and the beneficiary.
What surprised us
Charisse Sydoriak, who spent 28 years monitoring wildfires for the National Park Service, put it well in Jim's piece: what stood out was the range of ideas developed in such a short time, from spatial risk visualization to behavior change tools to a game-based platform. All from about 30 people in a single Saturday.
But the thing that surprised me most wasn't the technical output. It was the cooperation. Teams shared code, APIs, and data structures across projects. Nobody was protecting their territory. It felt less like separate groups building separate things and more like a single distributed team assembling a larger system from different starting points. We didn't plan for that. It just happened.
What it means
I measure the success of Rogue Raise in two ways.
First: can we activate our community to become "move fast and fix things" solutionaries? We live in extraordinary times where our challenges are acute, but we also have new super powers. The gap isn't in talent or tools. It's in our collective will to use them.
Second: do real-world tools actually emerge? As Sydoriak noted, none of the prototypes are ready for deployment yet. That's honest and expected. But the distance from proof of concept to preliminary release is measured in weeks, not months. That timeline still shocks people who've watched these problems go unaddressed for years.
What's next
The work continues in two tracks. The prototypes are being synthesized into a primary deployable solution through our Monday AI Builders Lab, with a first-phase release targeted for this spring. Annie Lundgren and the team have already expanded the scope beyond what we originally imagined.
Check out the ecosystem of projects and demos to see what emerged.
Just one example: Annie's project makes it easy to plan and shop for "fire reluctant" plants for your home:
Meanwhile, we're building out the Rogue Raise model itself for application to other challenges. Food systems is likely next. The whole point is that you can assemble a diverse group of stakeholders and solution builders and get to working prototypes without a big budget or a bureaucratic process. We intend to keep it that way.
The bigger bet
Bob Kaplan told the group that the city's goal is to turn Ashland from a fuel source to a fuel break, with 90% community coverage over the next decade. That's the kind of ambition that demands new approaches. Ralph Bloemers reminded us that once 40-50% of a neighborhood achieves fire resistance, social momentum takes over.
We're betting that a small community can build the tools it needs rather than waiting for someone else to build them for us. After last weekend, I'm more confident in that bet than I was before.
The next Rogue Raise is coming. Bring your skills. Bring your neighbors. Bring the problems you're tired of just talking about.
We are grateful to Ashland.news for helping get the word out, and to every person who showed up ready to build. Rogue Raise was not just a successful event. It was a proof of concept for a new kind of civic engagement, one where people come together not to talk about problems but to actually build solutions, together, in real time.
