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EventsCardano Africa Tech Summit

This page covers:

  1. Context
  2. Understanding of Needs
  3. Offer

Introduction

Prisma organises transformation-oriented events. We integrate regenerative design, facilitation and innovation to create the conditions for highly participatory, engaged and emergent collective action. Our events are like a new kind of hackathon, and our last event took place in Accra, lasting two weeks. Working with one on-the-ground hub in Accra and a partner in the Northern region, we managed to cover:

  • Systems thinking and complexity
  • Community outreach and intervention design
  • Self-organising, leadership and roles
  • Decentralised decision-making
  • Values system design, leading to…
  • Community-led evaluation and funding distribution
  • Cardano training
  • A field trip 7 hours north
  • Pitch day presentations
  • Professional footage of interviews with each of the team leads
  • A dedicated digital commons for the hub (more below)
  • 400+ queryable reflection entries, through our in-house, voice-based, participatory story-making system, which is publicly available for a limited period at evaluate
  • Developing three inter-disciplinary teams working on three completely different, self-identified systems. Two of these teams are now developing into fully-fledged organisations, still working on their projects almost 3 months later. The combined funding applications made since the “hackathon” are well over $100k. These are not just codebases. These are genuine pathways to greater community vitality that those teams are finding and developing for themselves. The depth and breadth of these projects is not a coincidence - it’s exactly what Prisma is designed for.

We know what we’re doing. Some of the specialities we draw upon to do our work include:

  • Social Movement Organising
  • Social and Emotional Learning
  • Software Engineering and Data Analytics
  • Regenerative Design

These are not buzzwords, to us. They’re fields of study which our team has been training in for several years if not decades.

Understanding of Needs

Cardano Africa Tech Summit (CATS) is an opportunity to show Cardano, and its extended network connections, how much build activity and technology potential there is across sub-Saharan Africa. There are several organisations involved in the organising of this event, happening February 11-13, 2026, including Wada, who are the principal delegate responsible for the successful delivery of the Summit as a whole. There are two primary potentials that extend beyond the completion of the summit:

  1. Cardano Engagement: Emboldened Wada involvement in future Cardano projects, including more prominant governance influence
  2. Projecting: Future engagements resulting from projecting talent and initiatives from the ground up

The word “project” derives from “pro-” meaning forwards and “ye-” meaning throw or drive. ref

The key detail here, from an organisational standpoint, is to recognise the Summit as a project nested within a larger system. In this way, we can bring order also to the “hackathon” programmes, delivered by Prisma, for Wada, which are one part of the larger system of the summit (see Summit Nested Systems).

The “hackathon” programme is in service to amplifying the visibility of Cardano developer talent, on-the-ground, across Wada partner regions, in the form of projects. Therefore, a fourth and final organisational layer is required to be activated: the projects themselves (see Projecting).

How does this change your relationship to the use of the term “project?” If you think in terms of the capability of each team to project themselves and their work forwards onto the big stage, does that change how you frame the organising of the summit itself? What about the larger system the summit is part of? What new capabilities are we unlocking in that larger system, by delivering this summit as effectively as possible?

cardano-summit-nestedness

Offer

We provide a minimum viable infrastructure package to select partners to organise an event. With this infrastructure and our facilitation support, we believe we can work with the hubs in the Wada network to deliver…

  • 250 developers engaged (plus 375 non-developer team members)
  • 50 viable projects, from a total of 125 teams formed
  • 100 developers retained for roughly 3 months

These projects will be regionally relevant, designed with regenerative principles in mind, and made possible by building a chain of facilitator capacity through the hub network coordinated by Wada.

In order to deliver this, we’re going to be aiming for roughly 2,500 initial sign-ups, and would need to run 16 hackathons in total. How many hackathons per hub depends on how many hubs we can onboard between now and November 1st.

summit_roadmap

This table details the different perspectives important to consider for each interim stage of the overall process.


Interim StagesSign-upsPreliminary CourseInfrastructure OnboardingCardano TrainingHackathons
DeadlineOct 1Nov 1Nov 1Nov 1Dec 15
System LevelWadaHubsHubsHubsParticipants
Toolingregister.wada.org / register.summit.orgdocs.prisma.eventsdocs.hub.org, evaluate.hub.org, register.hub.org, enact.hub.orgdocs.hub.orgdocs.hub.org, evaluate.hub.org, register.hub.org, enact.hub.org
PurposeCohort formationParticipant orientation to regenerative principles & hub facilitation capacityHub publication capacityCardano trainingProject formation
ProcessShare link, referralsEnrolment callsOnboarding calls
ProductCohortsHackathon program designs (led by hubs)Hub docs
DependenciesReach, form designProgram design, hub onboardingEngagement, developer capacity, incentive
IncentivesSeed fundingImpact

In these images, the minimum viable infrastructure referred to above is indicated by the dashed red ellipse. These diagrams show the system level at which the apps are deployed to, indicating which organisation is (ideally) self-hosting or (at least) managing (i.e. their own account with a cloud service provider) the apps.

By building the chain of facilitation capacity referred to above, we will be working in alignment with the hubs to grow the incubation capacity of their hackathons. Bringing the same organisational stack to mind as before, this detail highlights the need to differentiate another level within the systems being worked on: the hubs.

Lastly, we have built the means for processing contributions at the level of voice notes from individual participants, in a Telegram group chat, where the group chat represents an organisational context. We call this timelining as it is a process of collectively and proactively creating a timeline of the process as a whole. With each hackathon being the start of teams working on transitioning their systems of place, these voice note reflections are a way to make visible the action on-the-ground, projecting the collective voice of these developers through the whole organisational stack to the summit itself.

cardano-summit-nestedness-w-teams-w-hubs

As well as the hackathon programme design and process facilitation, this organisational capacity and infrastructure is part of the core value offering made by Prisma. Prisma is a whole system, which has been designed to bridge social and technical to facilitate aligned collective action, from the ground up.

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