Spreading Butter at Global Gathering 2026
This year, Butter Box briefly (and covertly) took over the Global Gathering 2026 physical space with a fun, interactive community stress test!
The beautiful venue for the annual Global Gathering in Estoril, Portugal
People joined us at our booth for a short introduction to Butter Box. We showed them how to connect their smartphones to an offline local network, the kind of connection they could rely on if their mobile data network were censored or shut down. We then demoed the Butter Portal's chat, messaging, mapping and file sharing features, and visitors asked questions about how they might use Butter Box in their own work and communities.
Nathan loves to spread the Butter news at our Global Gathering booth
Once visitors had a basic understanding of how to use Butter Box, we recruited them to take part in our "Great Butter Hunt"! (I'm not sure it ever officially had a name, but that sounds good enough.) To power the experience, we set up six different Butter Boxen.
Setting up our "fleet" of Butter Boxen for the community testing
Each box was customized with its own Wi-Fi hotspot network name, server name, and a unique piece of content. That content was the clue players had to find in order to complete the hunt.
Customizing each Butter Box with a unique name and content clue for the hunt
We spread the six boxes out across the Global Gathering Feira venue: some in other booths, some hidden in trees, and others running on batteries and moving around in our team members' backpacks! Each player had to physically walk around the Feira hunting for Butter Boxen, using their device's Wi-Fi scan to look for any network with the word "butter" in its name. This simulated what a person might experience during an internet shutdown, searching for local offline networks that can give them access to critical services.
As players discovered the boxes, they earned points by taking screenshots of different actions:
- Discovered a Butter Box Wi-Fi network - 1 point
- Connected to the Butter Portal - 2 points
- Found the secret hunt clue through file sharing - 5 points
Celebrating and rewarding our players with squishy butter toys and other prizes
When they were done playing, whether or not they found all the boxes, players returned to our booth to tally their score. Prizes were awarded based on the points collected:
- Butter Squishy - 5 points
- Butter Hat - 10 points
- Butter Socks - 15 points
- Butter Beach Towel - 20 points
Demand for the prizes was much higher than we anticipated, and a large group of players competed fiercely to win the best ones, or multiples of their favorites. Never underestimate the motivating power of a fun reward!
In the end, our Butter Hunt booth and activity was a wonderful success at Global Gathering 2026. We pushed ourselves to run our largest "Butter Box Fleet" deployment yet in a single location, tested new ideas about discovery and content sharing between boxes, and onboarded a large number of new users, giving them new skills and a novel experience.