DeepMay is a 10-day technology education camp with three distinct goals. First, to teach organizers skills that enhance their technical autonomy and bolster our movements. Second, to dismantle hierarchies of technical expertise that confine the fruits of technical knowledge to a small class of highly specialized individuals. Third, to cultivate spaces where those with shared stakes in bringing about liberatory technological futures can think and build together. The camp provides opportunities for collaborative learning, collective idea generation, and cross-pollination.
Every year, camp takes place in a different region. This summer, we will be hosted outside of Minneapolis. We aim to curate a curriculum that centers local struggles while integrating both political education and technical rigor.
The 2026 camp will take place from August 7th-16th and is expected to serve 60-70 students across 4 distinct tracks. Each track has ~15-18 students. Total camp attendance is estimated to be 80-90 people, including instructors, support volunteers, organizers, and invited guests. All participants come together to share 3 meals a day, skill-share, camp together, and reproduce the space through collective effort. This fosters trust, long-lasting friendships, and a spirit of dedicated collaboration.
🔬 Data Analysis 🔬
Over the past several decades we have seen whistleblowers leak millions of classified documents of immense importance to social movements and human rights advocates. In the data analysis track we will develop a toolkit for querying and making sense of such unfathomably large treasure troves of information. Students will get hands on experience with tools like python, command line programming, docker containers, seaborn, pandas, and scikit-learn.
🛠️ Engineering 🛠️
Everyone makes things all the time. The engineering track offers participants an opportunity to engage with problem solving as a holistic practice
and field of study while considering what it means to design and build toward the world we want to inhabit. With the breadth of domains ranging from
software/firmware, electrical, mechanical, industrial engineering, and fabrication, students will be exposed to the unique techniques of each discipline
and also their rarefied commonalities-- revealing the gestalt of engineering as a craft. Concretely, the track will include hands-on overviews to software
design, writing firmware and programming microcontrollers, prototyping, debugging, working with computer aided design (CAD) tools for electrical design and
mechanical design, using computer numerical control (CNC) machines for fabrication, and beyond.
🤖 Autonomous Infrastructure 🤖
The autonomous infrastructure track will explore how to build community-controlled systems that provide the tools necessary for everyday living and organizing. Students will learn how to set up a server and host open-source versions of widely used platforms like google drive, with an eye towards security & privacy. We will also investigate systems with which we still struggle to regain autonomy and the risks they pose such as phone networks, ISPs, cloud computing platforms, and social media.
🥷 Hacking 🥷
This track will introduce students to web application security from a hacker's perspective, encouraging students to probe, experiment with and break the technology that makes up the internet. We will emphasize thinking strategically about web security weaknesses, Internet protocols, and the (mis-)use of public data and APIs.
| 9:00am | Breakfast |
| 10:00am-1:00pm | Track instruction (session I) |
| 1:00pm | Lunch |
| 2:00-4:00pm | Track instruction (session II) |
| 4:30-6:30pm | Workshops |
| 7:00pm | Dinner |
| 8:00-9:30pm | Talks, fireside chats, movie screenings, fun stuff |
The sun warms you in the morning and hits your cheeks bright as you unzip your tent. Big stretch. You walk to the kitchen and find the faces of classmates you met the day before and join them over a bowl of corn congee and S tier camp coffee. Someone saw a cool bird yesterday. You'll keep an eye out. Off to class.
The autonomous infrastructure track is learning how to deploy software from Coop Cloud. Your friend has a Quake 3 Arena server running in like 5 minutes. You jump in and your teacher frags you repeatedly until you notice that your neighbor is struggling to get their deployment working. You and the rest of your table spend 30 minutes troubleshooting before realizing their configuration was missing a semicolon. Everyone is in now.
The sun rises in the sky and the heat is palpable. After that bonding session, your classmate addresses the room, "We should grab lunch quick and go swim, right?" "Duh!" Meeting the shores of Lake Superior, you notice many others had this idea. You're surprised how many names you already know, and how many address you by yours. One with the hivemind, you all run in. Freezing. Worth it. A beautiful sentence catches your ear. "Yeahhh my friend and I actually have been wanting to create a mesh network, but we live in a smaller town and are stuck troubleshooting a few parts of the process." You introduce yourself and find that you live not far from each other and have some mutuals. The world is beautiful. You notice others starting to rush back. Mesh chat will have to resume at another time.
Near the end of class, you deploy an etherpad instance on the local server infrastructure and everyone clowns on a fresh pad.
Returning to the common space, the workshops for the evening are re-announced. "Cybernetics for Faggots" What the hell is even that. You'll have to get a summary later, and head to the kitchen for dinner prep. The chef goes over the dinner plan, cumbia plays above, and the mesh-curious person you met earlier walks in. Mesh-net chat resumes while both your hands are deep in a 20L massaging cabbage. Over bowls of borsht they introduce you to their friends and around the fire you'll spend the rest of the evening chatting. Someone made a solar-powered charger today. Someone in the engineering track liberated their laptop from Windows. As fire turns to ember, you return to snuggle in your sleeping bag, grab the reading you found that day, and fall asleep immediately—text in hand, open to the first page. Tomorrow is yet to be known.