What do starfish have to do with TEX?

Ori Brafman’s book, “The Starfish and Spider” contrasts centralized and decentralized organizations. As a simple way to show the difference, Brafman considers Encyclopedia Britannica, a centralized, spider organization, where editors invite experts to contribute carefully curated content. Wikipedia, in contrast, is a decentralized starfish organization that leverages collective effort and intelligence.

TEX is more starfish than spider. The TEX staff love doing community science, and now we’d like to use our experience and passion to help you do community science.

We do that by letting you connect with tools, experts, and resources that you can use to do community science. To make it even more ‘starfishy’, we want to encourage you to develop, test, and refine those tools and resources. Then, we would like to make it easy for you to share what you are learning and contribute new tools and resources to TEX.

In short, we believe you are the emerging experts in community science (after all you are the one’s doing it), and our job is to help you do it. We also want to make it easy for you to share what you learned, and help grow the starfish.