Prisma originated during a process of co-designing with the Regenesis Institute, an education institution that has been working on growing the field of Regenerative Design and Development for over 25 years. They required a platform to make visible their network activity, through case-studies of regenerative design and development being applied in the real world.
Two key design constraints were…
- that the platform as a whole must have the capability to self-evolve, and
- that the platform must be able to serve place-unique development pathways.
In order to address these design constraints, the choice was made to make the build process of the platform itself distributed. Prisma evolved from a platform concept to a startup, where the team that formed began dedicating themselves to designing processes for organising participatory events called Action-Learning Journeys. These action-learning journeys, organised and facilitated by Prisma, create the conditions for teams on the ground to identify and start working on regionally-grounded whole-system transition pathways. A key characteristic of these events are the synthesis of practice and technology to create examples of systems-change in the real world, backed by data generated from the activity on-the-ground.
Now, Prisma has applied these incubation methodologies in a variety of contexts and scales, in close partnership with Wada, who have been there from the beginning:
- Before Prisma was an organisation, a trial event was organised, to which a representative and a partner of Wada attended to support: https://docs.prisma.events/context-narrative/Replace%20Academy%20Case%20Study
- The first official event Prisma organised was hosted by a hub in the Wada network in Accra, Ghana: https://docs.prisma.events/events/accra
- And now we are organising a series of hackathons with over 20 local hubs across sub-Saharan Africa, in preparation for the Cardano Africa Tech Summit: https://potentialise.prisma.events/
The nature of work of Wada and Regenesis have many parallels, because both are a non-local network of local, on-the-ground activity. This interrelationship between two distinct levels of systems creates a dynamic that is exactly what Prisma is built for: enabling a more-than-local network to engage a broader audience with data-backed storytelling of work on-the-ground. However, a key difference is that Wada is at home in web3, whereas Regenesis and its network is generally not onboarded to web3, and instead work as regenerative practitioners in many different fields in different roles.
One way to describe the commonality of this network’s activity is that its members are working on (or intend to work on) ecological transition initiatives, hence the language above of whole-system transition pathways. Therefore, although Regenesis itself is a small organisation, its globally-distributed network spans a vast surface area of sectors with its members working on deep systemic shifts, often taking shape as multi-million dollar projects: