Can a festival in a field run software with no signal?

Hypothesis

Co-created gatherings like The Borderland run on printed programs and word of mouth, because the field has no signal. An offline-first progressive web app — install once on wifi, works forever after — should carry the whole program, map, and personal schedule with zero connectivity.

What we built

Jomo26: a PWA for the Borderland 2026 program. Everything ships in the app shell — program data, schedule views, favourites — cached by a service worker so the app is fully functional in airplane mode. No accounts, no backend dependency at show time, installable straight from the browser.

Learnings

• Offline-first inverts normal web thinking: the network is the edge case. Designing from "no connectivity, ever" makes the app simpler, not harder.
• A PWA beats a native app for a temporary community: no app store, no install friction, one URL passed around a campfire.
• The build-time data pipeline is the real work — the app is only as good as the program data baked into it before people leave civilisation.

Log

• 2026-07-11 — Live at jomoguide.com.
• 2026-07-08 — Program views and offline caching working; content updates continuing toward the event.
• 2026-06-25 — Project started as an offline-first Vite PWA.