From Spiders to Starfish: Hacking the Transnational

Spiders and starfish may look alike, but starfish have a miraculous quality to them. Cut off the leg of a spider, and you have a seven-legged creature on your hands; cut off its head and you have a dead spider.

Cut off the arm of a starfish and it will grow a new one. Not only that, but the severed arm can grow an entirely new body. Starfish can achieve this feat because, unlike spiders, they are decentralized; every major organ is replicated across each arm.”

You may not think of spiders, let alone starfish when it comes to thinking about how people can organise across borders to make change happen. But think of what would happen to a hierarchical organisation if its leaders were incapacitated and what would happen to a horizontal network… you get the picture.

There are a growing number of starfish-style networks who work across borders to mobilise people’s energies to stimulate new forms of creative civic culture.

Gangsters, Sandboxers, Cityminers & Edgeryders – who are these transnational tribes that are coming together to change the world around them? How do we bridge these initiatives with institutions like governments, charities and…the EU?

We’ll be kicking off work on this over the summer, but in the meantime, we’re delighted to be supporting SenseCamp in London on 28th June where creative & innovative minds from across Europe will be coming together to share lessons from the frontline and develop radical solutions to crunchy issues.

Apart from being called “Gangsters” and “Sense Makers”, we love how they help each other out not just in their own cities, but across the continent. From Holdups to SenseCamps, Make Sense share our love for using creative methods to bring people together to hack new ways of doing things to the difficult social issues we face…don’t take our word for it, check out the video below and come to SenseCamp.

SenseCamp UK 2013 from MakeSense on Vimeo.