As mentioned in the thread on rebranding , it would be valuable to connect with people and organisations doing Māori Digital Sovereignty work. This thread is a place to share links to organisational websites and news articles relevant to this.
A good intro to the subject can be found here:
“If we get Māori Data Sovereignty right, the benefits of more thoughtful and deliberate data collection, storage, protection, and sharing benefit everyone. As individuals and communities, we’re more engaged with and aware of the data held about us and how it is used, which can help us to make better decisions.”
Talk by Dr. Karaitiana Taiuru (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Rārua, Pākehā) - NZRSE 2021 Keynote: Māori Data Sovereignty An introduction and implementation in the research sector:
Karaitiana is quoted on Māori data sovereignty in this article on the new national health data platform, by Phil Pennington:
If yewtu.be is not working, replacing that domain with any Invidious or Piped instance that is, or with youtu.be. NZOSS could be of service by hosting a PeerTube instance in a datacentre located in Aotearoa (eg CatalystCloud), and make channels available to people and organisations doing Māori digital sovereignty work.
Te Aroha Grace of Ngāti Whātua Ōrakei did a keynote in 2019 on Mana Matihiko - Sovereignty Through Digitisation:
Inside the fight for Māori data sovereignty by Shanti Mathias:
A number of technologists and researchers are mentioned in this article including;
- Kaye-Maree Dunn (Te Rarawa, Ngā Puhi) and Ben Tairea (Ngāti Nurou, Kuki Airani) of Ahau.io
- Tahu Kukutai (Ngāti Tiipa, Ngāti Kinohaku, Te Aupōuri), professor of demography at the University of Waikato, and director of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga. Also founder of Te Mana Raraunga, the Māori data sovereignty network
- Keoni Mahelona (Hawai’i), Te Hiku Media
Te Kāhui Raraunga Charitable Trust (Te Kāhui Raraunga or TKR) is an independent body established in 2019 to lead the action required to realise the advocacy of the Data Iwi Leaders Group (Data ILG):
“The co-design of a Māori data governance (MDG) model is one of four workstreams of the Mana Ōrite Work Programme between Stats NZ and the Data Iwi Leaders Group (DILG) of the National Iwi Chairs Forum (NICF)”:
Some indigenous data sovereignty readings compiled by Te Mana Raraunga, the Māori Data Sovereignty Network:
A number of sections of Offshoring New Zealand Government Data, report prepared for Statistics New Zealand refer to how this impacts Mātauranga Māori:
https://www.data.govt.nz/docs/report-offshoring-nz-govt-data/
Also, my own little contributions to supporting Mātauranga Māori in the digital space:
https://web.archive.org/web/20170409063924/https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/paper-for-nzciel-2010/
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This article mentions Lee Timutimu, who is the CEO of Te Matarau, the Māori Tech Association:
This article is a very useful list of people to reach out to;
‘Inaugural awards for Māori excellence in digital and tech names finalists’
This next article mentions Waikato University, associate professor of computer science Te Taka Keegan, Ngapera Riley of Figure.nz, and Sonny Ngatai:
"Despite the challenges, Keegan was generally positive about AI.
He thought if it could be isolated, trained by Māori, and controlled at an iwi level, Māori could retain sovereignty and use it as a helpful tool.
‘We need to make sure it is cut off from the mothership, that it wasn’t feeding everything back to to the mothership, because everyone loses if that’s the case’."
None of this is possible with ChatGPT because it’s proprietary and centralised, which is a good example of how software freedom and the decentralisation it enables can support digital sovereignty.
Yes, I’d like to explore what we can offer here to assist. For example, I already have PeerTube instances (though none onshore Aotearoa). The problem is the cost of local bandwidth for folks like CatalystCloud - it’d be a big cost to them to host a video platform.
This is something I very much want to explore for Bridge Seat purposes. To help keep the digital sovereignty thread on track, I’ve created a new thread about video hosting where we can geek out on this in detail.
On this topic, I’ve been in contact with Keoni from https://tehiku.nz who’ve set up their own self-managed hosting here in Aotearoa for the purpose (as I understand it) of Māori data sovereignty & self-determination. They’ve done that themselves with some help from folks at https://catalyst.net.nz and probably https://catalystcloud.nz (who, for full disclosure, also sponsor the hosting resources we use for this Discourse forum among many other things)…
Another important group to engage with;
“Our data, our sovereignty, our future. This vision drove the establishment of Te Mana Raraunga as the Māori Data Sovereignty Network. We advocate for Māori rights and interests in data to be protected as the world moves into an increasingly open data environment.”
