Origins
There are a great number of differences between Prisma’s approach to organising hackathons and many others. This difference is spoken to in a call with a CATS hub lead, and an interview with a past participant .
You may have noticed that so far in terms of a sense of unknown, vagueness, or ambiguity. Perhaps you have noticed the abstract language and seemingly never-ending nuance.
At the end of the day, our hackathons are such because of where they come from. This can be understood to mean, literally, lineages of systems-change practices and social movements.
- Regenerative design and development
- Delicate activism
- Social and ecological justice movements, such as Extinction Rebellion
- Community-oriented currency design, such as SEEDS and Holochain
Each of these are themselves an immeasurable amount of work, caringly undertaken by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, and influencing many more in direct and indirect ways. It is with a deep respect for these practices that we approach facilitating collective action most purposefully .
Complexity
Around the start of the century, early 2000s, researchers in the U.S. began noticing patterns across otherwise separate fields of inquiry. Their curiosity led them to explore this phenomenon further, and this led to the birth of Complexity Science . To work with these patterns they observed, they required a new approach - one that started with the recognition of interrelationship, change, the openness of systems, and continuous learning.
Complexity grew as both a field and language, and soon people from these otherwise separate fields began finding common ground, leading to insight and creativity. Riding on these currents of curiosity and inquiry into systems, and the capabilities of being able to speak across disciplines, emerges Prisma : part social, part technological, one whole and ever-changing.
Nature
Of course, complexity and the wonder of life has also been close to the hearts of many communities who have not forgotten this relationship with the rest of the natural world.
Many of these communities are deeply rooted to the land, and know of ways of seeing that recognise how nature really works. We call this kind of intelligence place-sourced , meaning the source of understanding is the place itself, as a living system.
In this way, working with complexity is not something cutting-edge, although it also can feel that way at times, but is instead a returning - to intuition, to respect, to humility.
Hacking
We are here to effect change. There are a great many complexes that deserve disrupting, and if you are here, reading this, that means you are finding a role for yourself in that picture, in one way or another.
Our role is to bring you and those systems into relationship in a way where new capabilities for evolution are unlocked. There are whole schools of thought that guide us, as well as our own lived experiences (some more than others), and we ask for your trust in that.
Self Organising
We go about this by asking you to bring yourselves forwards. We’ve designed a system of socio-technological facilitation to unlock in you and your communities - higher orders of alignment and coordination. We do this because we want to see meaningful participation in meaningful work, and that’s for you to decide what that means.
What makes us different to other hackathons is that the code is somewhat secondary - an inevitable by-product of highly motivated and effective groups of people, with clarity of roles and direction. We work on systems, including yourselves, and us too - and we invite you to do the same.
Publishing
Finally, we are offering the means for you to approach this as story-making. From start to summit, we invite you to see this as an account of unlocking whole-system transformation . We can only meet you where you’re willing to go. We’ve prepared a great deal for this, both directly and indirectly, to support you as best we can. But the details are for you to decide.
So, the question is returned to you - what makes this hackathon different?
