Digital Tools to Battle Ecological Crisis: Jen Castro on Building Technologies with Frontline Communities26 min read

Communities that have for millennia sustained ecosystems through land stewardship are now on the frontlines of the global ecological crisis. Jen Castro, Co-Director of Digital Democracy, spoke with us about her work building digital tools with indigenous Earth defenders, and the importance of making them authors of their own digital future.

Mai Ishikawa Sutton (MIS): Many information communication technologies are built with the stated goal of improving the lives of the global majority in terms of economic development. They’re often framed as giving access to the internet or bridging the digital divide. Can you tell me a little bit about that approach, and what makes Digital Democracy different?

Jen Castro (JC): That’s a great question. I have been in a different workspace where bridging the digital divide was also part of the mandate, so I have a good reference point there. But there’s always this assumption about a collective broad direction, that is kind of uniform. Often a lot of outreach talking about social work and social services-whether it’s healthcare or human rights – it’s about opening up, easing the resistance for folks who are dealing with the impacts of various kinds of systemic violence, to access the things that they need to survive in their context. 

For a lot of folks in North America, that’s still very much the case. Connectivity as a human right for Indigenous communities is a very valid platform, because institutional violence is the fact that everything that you need in terms of social services, or health care and civil services is based on internet-accessible infrastructure. In places where there has been mass devastation, there is no option for food sovereignty or land sovereignty. Sometimes demanding access to the things that the rest of a settler population has is a valid direction. 

However, there’s still so many different communities in this world who actually still have access to their land and have a meaningful relationship with it – whether they have always been there or have been there  over a long period of time. That is the frontline of our climate crisis: these areas of the planet that have sustained ecosystems that have been around for millennia. The old growth forests, or marshlands, that have been filtering water and cleaning it for centuries. These spaces that have been largely untouched by industrialization have humans attached to them, and they’re increasingly becoming more and more of a minority because of continued extraction and exploitation. Different kinds of violence affect their relationship with their land, but they still exist. 

Because of that cornerstone – the communities who are still in relationship with nature and continue to be stewards of the land – our mission to address climate change at some of its root resources stems from providing tools to support them and making them authors of their own digital future, on a completely new basis. Tools that are unique to them because they are either on the frontlines of industrialization or they still have their original ecologies to work with.

MIS: Often many projects seem to parachute technologies into communities. Digital Democracy’s approach is markedly different, where technology is both rooted in communities’ needs and you require their close participation in tech development. How is it that you work with communities to design technology from the bottom up?

JC: You know, the organization is 15 years old. The roots of Digital Democracy had been in identifying human rights issues and then figuring out if there were open source tools or training that would help people address their needs. There were different kinds of situations – one was electoral, some around gender violence, and then there were calls for help through networks of youth journalists. Digital Democracy was responding to those things.

Then things started to shift a little bit more into tool building. Through the ties that we built, we started to talk about territory mapping and participatory mapping. Communities wanted to know how to talk about their territory, in a way that states couldn’t ignore because mapping had been used as a tool to displace them. 

So they were like, “Okay, what if we could find a map that would prove them wrong?,” essentially. 

For that participatory mapping process, we were using open source tools, we were using pen and markers – those were the tools that were being introduced at the time. And obviously, folks were seeing the power of it, but they also knew the governments have more technology. The governments have better data. They kept discounting what we had on pen and paper. GPS points were not enough. We felt we needed to understand more, and not have to have a specialist or legal counsel be the intermediary in this process. We wanted to be able to articulate this. 

And the tools just didn’t exist. There were some that are open source and available, but the issue was the usability. What is reasonable for someone who is spending 80% of their waking energy, manually working on the land, to learn a complex GIS software to be able to do territory defense? Whether it was monitoring illegal invaders coming in and stealing cattle or miners appearing on site. These things were happening, and we needed to be able to report them faster. We are either working with or against government or institutional bodies that only recognize scientific data, so we needed these tools. And we couldn’t find them. 

We did as much as we could until we got to the point where we realized that we actually had to do more than a hack. We actually had to build something that was made for them, because all the other tools were made for people who have had access to technology for years. So this is a very different population, whose only introduction to these things has been smartphones, not laptops. And so it’s just a different beast. 

Through word of mouth people are observing how these tools could help. Like “we heard through our neighbor that you won this case, we want to be able to do that too.” There are lots of networks that happen as well, where there are already researchers in territories doing work and the communities say they want similar tools, and they’re literally looking up what is available. And the researchers find us and they’re like, “well, it looks like these people have these tools, let’s reach out to them.” And that’s how we get a constant flow of communities that will either reach out to us directly or reach out to us via some of the allies that they may already have in the territory.

MIS: Could you share a story or an example of that kind of research partnership? One that was exciting that, you know, maybe you wouldn’t have imagined or that you felt was particularly impactful?

JC: Yes, so I think I’ll go to one of the key stories where the plot really shifted into tool building.

Northern Peru has been a center of decades of different kinds of academic advocacy work, which were dealing with 50 years of oil spills and contamination sites that just had been ignored, or not dealt with. So advocacy work had been happening there already for a long time in the territory by different academics and researchers. There had also been local NGOs that had been doing advocacy work there, and one of our teammates, Gregor MacLennan, was introduced to the zone through the work there, independently. 

He and some other peers formed an NGO in Peru, as non Peruvians, to build skills and help the community monitors document oil spills and make reports that could be recognized legally, because their oral reports were not enough. And so he was part of that work for a long time, then he paused and changed careers. 

Meanwhile the local monitors’ work continued. It was the moment that Gregor met the founder of DD, Emily Jacobi, in California. Gregor had been working at Amazon Watch as a campaigner, knew this work [in Peru] was ongoing there and that they still didn’t have the right tools. When he met Emily, he was like “Okay, now we have an organization whose mission is actually to help use technology to address these gaps and what if we actually start to build them?”

So it’s a slow story, because the co-building process does require a lot of proximity. We were then able to have that through our other partners in Ecuador, who had more availability and a lot of local organizing in place for us to be able to come in and do our work and focus on the technology. Through our partners in Ecuador, we were able to start with the desktop version of Mapeo for territory mapping. The vision for having a mobile app that could document oil spills was always there. It took maybe five or six years, then we were finally able to bridge that gap for them. I was there when we delivered the mobile app to the folks in northern Peru. Now that they have that tool there, there’s a lot less technical limitation for more community participation in their work as monitors. And that is key there, because there’s always been monitors who were willing to train, but it took so much dedication to learn these tools and learning how to use GPS devices. Whereas smartphones are way more accessible, tangible, and easier to teach. 

So now there are more monitors who are participating in this work. They’re actually able to get way more information to build national cases. The local organization or local advocates are continuing to work on that. We’re just supporting them with technology and responding to their needs, which are really particular because they have a digital literacy that is really different and unique from what the majority of software is designed for.

MIS: There’s often tension around people from different cultural contexts building technologies together – for instance when technology is built in the “Global North,” particularly in the United States. There’s often many assumptions about how to do things the right way, while dealing with the realities of network infrastructure within local contexts. For those with resources and access, I think it’s often hard for them to recognize and acknowledge their privilege. Does Digital Democracy grapple with this tension at all?

JC: I think we feel it now that we’re at this point in software development for the Mapeo tool. But it didn’t exist before. We weren’t a software development organization, our mission wasn’t to build software. Our mission was never to come up with the most cutting edge tool, but to serve communities who could use technology to gain power. And the interesting thing was that we were realizing that there just wasn’t any out there. 

So it comes from that place. It’s not about coming up with a flagship tool or application. It’s about what is serving these communities that have really common struggles. We knew we could continue working with individual communities, one-on-one, but the reality is that a lot of the different communities who are dealing with climate impacts directly, right now share common stories. They share the same struggles, share the same – for lack of a better word – enemies. If they’re able to access the same tools, they’re empowered to use those tools in the way that they want. They can save and store their data locally, and not have to deal with some of the other obligations that come with other software. If it’s online based, then they have to get an internet connection to use it. In our case, it’s as hyperlocal as possible with peer-to-peer storage. 

That changes the focus: We’re not trying to build software, we’re trying to help folks access technology that they need. Right now in our current reality, where digital information is the currency of the future, technology has been used against these communities. So this is an opportunity for them to quite literally build the first blocks of their own digital futures, together with us. We don’t have an objective for our software to be monetized, or to scale up the way that other software companies are forced to. Because corporations are structured that way. So for us, software development comes from a very different place. 

The reality is that our tools are not necessarily designed to be useful for us. It’s designed to be useful for people on the land. The responsiveness of us being able to add features as a tiny organization, as quickly as our partners are imagining them, has been extremely difficult. Because their imaginations are fast and they know their contexts so well, they can imagine solutions way better than we can. They are constantly kind of pushing for us to open up what might be possible in the future, because we have to build technology that’s going to be resilient enough for that. That’s the current tension right now, as we’re building for a future that we might not even know about.

MIS: It seems like Digital Democracy has deep ties with particular communities who you work closely with to design your tools. But there are so many different contexts, languages, cultural norms and different ways to relate with technology. How much have your tools been adopted by other communities? Or have they largely been helpful for those you’re partnered with?

JC: Actually, it has been remarkable to see what is out there. Though it’s hard to find out because Mapeo is offline first, and we don’t have any servers. If we hear about how it’s working for people, it’s because groups have reached out to us either with questions or just to say, “Hey, this is what we’re doing with your tool. Thanks!” But mostly, we just get questions like, “We saw the work that was done in Ecuador, we want to do something similar. How do we make it so that the map’s observation categories match our context?”

We then provide documentation, and make sure that work can happen. There’s currently a little bit of a technical barrier in terms of customization, but once people get through that current barrier the user cases are really fascinating.

There’s an organization in Southeast Asia, Open Development Initiative (ODI), that works with numerous different indigenous populations, I think in three or four different countries in Southeast Asia: Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos, as well, a few others. And they have started to use Mapeo to track and map their elders so that they can care for them in crisis. That wasn’t what Mapeo was designed for, but they have quite literally mapped like an elder support network. It blew my mind when I learned about it. I was like, “What? they did, what??” They just saw a need. They wanted to make sure that no elders were forgotten, that they could be cared for if their family couldn’t reach them or because roads were blocked. They wanted to be able to provide, you know, water and food and medical care to everyone on the network. They did that project and I was like I would never have possibly imagined this. Basically, it was like preparation for crisis response. 

I think there’s a lot of imagination that can be applied to Mapeo because there’s lots of customizations that can happen, including adding languages. We just did a release for a group in Mongolia. And so for people to be able to access the technology and learn it in their own language without having to learn an intermediary colonial language, is radical. It really is to be able to think in your own language and think about your visual reality in your language. That is really powerful stuff. 

For those of us who speak English other dominant European languages, it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to speak in your own Indigenous language, about technology, with technology. So I think imagination is amazing and can be applied to Mapeo. At the same time, there are some things that are difficult. 

During the pandemic, there were some immediate asks, for crisis response. For example, if they could track COVID cases using Mapeo. I knew in my gut, the answer was a hard “No”. We did actually pause and do a little bit more research and try to seek different sorts of expert information, especially on healthcare data. And we did have to balance the Western perspective of healthcare data as being hyper private, versus when data can be made public. This kind of separation doesn’t exist for the Indigenous partners that we work with. For them, land data and family health data are equally intimate and public information. So we did have to wrestle with that. 

But the reality is Mapeo was using peer-to-peer software and back-end data systems. So any information that’s personal, or private, or that could put someone in a vulnerable position, ends up being shared, in the community, in the data community, of all of those peers. You have to have an agreement or have trust with who is going to be part of that group, who is participating in that peer-to-peer network. 

And at the time, and even still, Mapeo 5, is still based on a high level of trust that someone got the right set of keys. There’s no way to change that person’s setting from the outside. So if personal health data is collected, it could end up on a phone or computer 10 years down the road, of someone newly joining the community, that data could be out of date. But also, if it’s not out to date, it could actually be used in a way that is not desired. And so we had to come up with a bit of a safety protocol around the use of data for medical health data and those sorts of things. 

We’ve had to learn and adapt. We’ve been building a new back-end to support a lot more security features, and encryption for Mapeo 6 going into the future. When we have our new backend out publicly, even more creativity will be possible because it will open up possibilities for managing different kinds of data and easier to control if something is insecure. And there’s a lot of potential for the future and we also know that frontline, Indigenous, and land-based communities will always need these tools.

MIS: You touched on this idea of data sovereignty – allowing communities to have a say over what information is private or public. The terms by which data is shared within the community, as well as how information is shared outside of it. I feel like that level of agency flies in the face of how the capital “I” corporate Internet works. Where we’re expected to unquestionably use these platforms and everything is sucked up into this massive data trove. We don’t even know what happens to all this information about us. 

Because these companies are largely based in the United States, specifically in Silicon Valley, this dynamic very much echoes colonialism. And so could you define data sovereignty in relation to this kind of digital colonialism? How is it that it allows for the imaginative use of data?

JC: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting how people are really curious about data sovereignty, but not nearly as curious about food sovereignty or water sovereignty. Because it’s exactly the same thing. It’s about your ability to either produce it or access it, if it’s part of your landscape. It’s your ability to make decisions. 

Sovereignty really does come down to having the ability to have local governance over what is happening. And with digital sovereignty, it’s interesting because I think for those of us who were kind of in the “matrix” that was never an option. We weren’t being invited to participate as active architects in our digital features. It was being mapped out for us from the beginning. And we jumped in, because we like shiny things. And we have been told that it’s access, when really the access has been the inverse. 

It feels funny to talk about digital sovereignty, because really what we should be talking about is digital slavery. Understanding what context we’re existing in, and asking all those open questions about, well, “What does it mean to build our own digital future?” – independent of these structures that have, quite literally enslaved us, made us attached to an extractive data system. 

I think we’re so fortunate in Digital Democracy to be able to work with people who don’t have those assumptions so deeply entrenched. They ask the questions about their data: Where does it live? Who does it go to? Who has access to it? Those are things that the rest of the digital sphere have only recently started to question as a population. But those are the first questions they ask, because they’ve learned those lessons, by how the land has been treated, or by how the waters have been treated, or by how their hunting trails have been treated. 

Or they know the impact of when a species of berry dies out. They know what happens when climate change affects the land, and the caribou can’t run through it. They know that it’s not just a small change, that there are ripple effects on broader pieces. So they already have this practice of asking questions about what happens when data is either shared, changed, or saved, and so on.

It’s really important to pause and reflect how little imagination some of us have had around our own digital identities in digital existence. You know, we have rights as human beings, we have rights as living things, and they’re natural rights. It’s weird that those rights don’t exist in the digital sphere, when they absolutely can and should. 

I think that’s what our partners are inviting us to do, to confront the challenge of how we build a way for digitization to happen, under their terms, that can be both understood and accessed from their own cultural perspective. That it includes their languages, that takes the shape of something that is more recognizable, like natural socialization of human information, when people talk to each other and have conversations. 

When we work with different collaborators, or partners, what they share is often like what they want to do immediately. Because of this aspect of permanent digital data, it’s our job to consistently ask questions like: “What happens in the future? Where does it go? How do you want it to behave? 20 years from now, 100 years from now? We don’t want this information to become a weapon against you.” Western colonization has been so good at weaponizing data against people. So we really do have to ask these kinds of probing questions about futures, and trust the wisdom of the partners to be able to understand and know what they want for themselves.

MIS: In the previous interview I did in this series, Sammie Veeler talks about the difference between data storage and archiving, where archiving is more intentional in its preservation and ideally carries with it its historicized context. 

So on that note, I wanted to shift to your background as an artist and storyteller. In your bio, you say that you do work with community-based artistic practices. How is that connected to your work at Digital Democracy – particularly is it relates to the storytelling around local information? How does that shape the way you think about local knowledge and the new approaches needed to ensure that the narratives stay in the hands of those who produce and steward their own information?

JC: When it comes down to it, if the desire for the information is for it to be reabsorbed by other humans, that is the defining piece. If the desire for the information is to be processed by AI or other kinds of computational processes for creating algorithms, that is a different product. 

We’re interested in what is going to be re-accessed by humans. Because at the end of the day, it’s the human storytelling that is able to create the diverse impacts that communities desire. Whether it’s advocacy or intergenerational cultural survival, or even collective mourning, you know, there is great importance for understanding what the cultural and spiritual value is of information that’s being collected. In the Western perspective, we’ve separated those social values from the scientific. The Indigenous worldview does not separate these things nearly as much. They’re quite intertwined. And so you know, I’ve learned a lot from different artists, especially from the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver artists who had been doing different kinds of archiving, and using art as their practice for storytelling. 

It was interesting to see them start dabble into different kinds of digital art, or using social media as a way for them to tell larger stories about their reconnection process, their displacement process, or to tell stories about the family that has dealt with intergenerational trauma. And so from that experience I learned to see how data, when in the hands of the people who are part of that culture, is not data anymore, it’s cultural information. Being able to pattern the cultural information in the way that makes sense in that culture, or the culture that is desired in the future – that is, I think the piece that our organization doesn’t really have a hand in directing. But we do have an important piece to create an openness in the software that allows for those steps, into enabling that autonomous definition of what that cultural container needs to be like.

MIS: If you were to imagine these practices extending 10 years into the future within the context of the climate crisis, how do you see these things playing out? Particularly in terms of understanding this kind of data as cultural information and how it relates to the necessary shifts that need to happen when it comes to the dominant societies’ relationship to the planet.

JC: Yeah, I think we’ve kind of invited new possibilities. At the moment that we put out publicly the Earth Defenders Toolkit, what it did was raise the stories, methodologies, and context in which these tools can be useful and effective. That really did spark something interesting. What it sparked was this concept that it’s not the tools that are going to solve different problems. It’s about how we work together to figure out which tools we need to keep in our toolkit to address our current and future needs.

We had a recent gathering in Ecuador, with many, many different Indigenous population groups from eight different countries. And it was wild, just to hear how each of them had been articulating how they are fighting or educating or investing their energies into building a future for their next generations. We’re just witnesses to it. I think that’s just the beginning of that process. 

One of the other things that’s really notable is noticing the existing assumptions about who is good at technology in the Western world. And so we will often go in and find out who has been given access to a computer, usually a young man somewhere between the ages of 22 and 32. That cultural baggage that we have around technology and Western culture has been imposed elsewhere. It’s been our deep desire to intervene on that as well as much as possible. 

Sometimes we have less control over that, but making sure that we’re proactively inviting people and saying, ”We need to know that women will be showing up. We need to know that there’ll be elders welcome. That kids are welcome. We need to see that it’s not just a fleet of young men who are doing this work. The whole community should understand it. And so one of the things that we’re looking forward to is trying to gather more women from diverse populations to actually sit down and figure out if they were part of the co-design process from the very beginning. How would they have done things? Because I think a lot of men’s perspective was included right in the beginning, just because of the nature of the way territory defense programs work on the ground. 

But if we totally change how we start that conversation and invite diverse women to share and find out from them, like, what is their cultural worldview? What are their commonalities as women? What have been the blind spots consistently in the software that we’re developing? And how do we make, again, openness and flexibility, be something that can be inclusive of diverse genders, which would naturally introduce different abilities and different age groups. 

We have yet to see what that could actually become. Right now, we’re in the really early stages of it being effective for intervening on mapping, monitoring, and territory issues. But what will it mean when tools start getting adopted or combined in a way that really mobilizes a perspective around intergenerational health? For example, how would that transform locally, when that story gets traded and shared with other people and places? How does that transform things beyond the local into different local spheres? 

I think that is the exciting part about where we’re at. Where I’m sitting right now, I can see that there’s so much inspiring future ahead, as long as we continue to center folks who have the imagination for their digital futures, to support them as they actually build ones that they can control.