Care for your Collections: Māori Values, Data Sovereignty and Library Systems | NDF25

for um quite a change from previous NDFs I noticed in most of the the presentations this morning. There's a a strong MAI element through most of the speakers. So, that's cool. Um, I'm going to hand over to Alicia now. We might be doing a bit of this throughout. Um, my name is Alicia and I work at Catalyst with Chris. Uh, I've been working on Koha and other open-source um, collection software since 2014. And, uh, I went to Vic and I do a bunch of, um, gender equality work and indigenous uh, rights and tech work on the side. So that's me. [Music] So, I'm Chris G. As it said, I'm the the blonde one in that photo. Um, as if you if you couldn't tell, uh, that is me and Topi Pudi at Wangi 1976. So, that kind of dates me. Um, one of the original Koha developers. I work at Catalyst IT and the senior leadership team there. My role there is to try and make Catalyst IT a better place for Mai to work at and a better place for Mai and Mai organizations at U and Hapu Faranu Hapuri to work with. So just a small job. Um I was a board member at Toha Toha which does no longer exist and uh previously creative commons. I was a board member of NDF for a while there as well. And I have another job at uh Tahua which is sits under the data IG the data wi leaders group under the WI cheer forum which the best job title I've ever had and mafetti mataku oranga atanga. So I don't know if any of you know weaving but mafettia are the cross stitch. So the digital cross stitch or the cloak of of hunga hanga is da of data. Um that's me. Oh yeah I can do the next one. Cool. Yeah, while we're here, we're just speaking on our own. Uh we're not speaking I'm not speaking on behalf of uh Tahu Donga. Definitely not on behalf of the Wii Cheers and or Catalyst. Um unless you really like it, in which case I am. Um if you don't like it, it's all me. Uh and and anything you don't like that Alicia said, that's my fault as well. So, all right. So today we want to explore how deeply held cultural values specifically copapa maldi and the critical concept of mai data sovereignty um can reshape our approach to the technologies that we use for cultural stewardship uh especially in libraries and in archives. Technology is often presented as neutral but it's always a reflection of the values of its creators. So technology even when it's artificial has a papa. So we're going to share a corded a story today rooted in altered using the journey of koha which is the world's first open-source library system as a powerful case study. The story of koha originating from community need and interwoven with mai principles provides valuable lessons. We'll discuss how core values like manaki tonga kityaki tonga and tinorangata tonga can be embodied in technology. the crucial link to MAI data sovereignty, the role of technology and language revitalization, and the potential for community-driven systems to better serve our diverse communities. So, yeah, technology often emerges from corporate goals. Um, but what happens when it arises directly from community needs grounded in local values? So, let's let's look at the origin of of our case study, Kohaa. So as probably I hope most of you are aware kohabbring began in hopeninoa in leven foxton Shannon and tooku the libraries in late 1999. Um the library trust there had a y2k problem. So they had a system that didn't understand uh four digits for a year. So it it just was going to go from 99 to 0. It plays all sorts of havocs with your um returns and overds and all those kind of things. So it just wouldn't work. um it was a proprietary system as well. So we couldn't fix it even though technically we we we would have been able to we legally couldn't. So they faced and and the other proprietary options that they could buy at that time were were prohibitedly expensive or didn't work because they were designed for places that weren't running um rural internet over phone lines over electric fences and all that kind of stuff that you had in 99 in New Zealand. So to the credit their response wasn't typical and a lot of the credit is to hop Library Trust and to uh people like Rosalie Blake who sadly passed on but Joe Ransom who's in the audience here is another one critical to it. They commissioned a new um library system which was built locally by Katipore Communications and tailored to meet their individual needs. This decision reflected a move towards self-determination and I was lucky to be the lead developer on that initial project. The system was gifted the name Kohaa signifying a gift a reciprocity a relationship. Um this embedded a MI value from the outset. Then it in 2000 the software itself was released as open source a true gri gift to the global library community. This value valuesdriven community-led origin provides a powerful contrast to the dominant tech narratives and sets the stage for how different values can shape technology. So, how can abstract cultural values translate into tangible technological features or practices? We're going to explore some key copamaldi principles and see how they can manifest using koha as an example. Just before you move on, that's me again um at Wangi again with my mom and nanny Davis. So, manaki tongue is the first one. Uh, it speaks to generosity, care, and reciprocity. In the digital realm, open source models strongly reflect this. And we've got a quote on the screen. I'm going to read it out. Um, mana is an old word, but it remains a beautiful way of approaching relationships, whether they be between friends, family, clients, or business associates. Living by the principles of manaki tonga means stopping to ask, whose manner am I encouraging? and am I elevating others whether that be through words or actions in uplifting others and giving them respect and arohha we also hold our own mana in balance so the koha example shows this really clearly the initial code was a gift and it sparked a global community where improvements are shared back freely benefiting everyone uh a digital gift economy we also find that um good software good technology is built by teams who have experienced Manaki Tanga, who have been nurtured. And in this digital gift economy, we have a global community that is motivated by um building something that is stable and secure and solves problems for people. And in doing so, we end up with a system that empowers uh libraries and organizations and other stewards of data and knowledge to to show monarchy to their communities and to the collections that they look after. Our next value is kitiyaki tonga. Kitiyaki tonga is active guardianship and stewardship particularly of tonga or treasures and madanga or knowledge. How can systems support this responsibility? Flexible platforms like Koha offer the potential for digital kitiaki tonga. Their customizability allows institutions to potentially define culturally specific metadata or implement access protocols based on local tikka. This work takes dedicated effort. uh it's not something that can be templated and copypasted across all different types of systems because it's acknowledging that people who use technology have different needs and different backgrounds and different motivations and so flexible platforms like Koha allow for that configurability and allow it to be more widely applicable but in a really customized way. So this kind of thing is easy with Kohaa by using things like the metadata frameworks feature or any of the hundreds of system preferences that Koha has available by default and that's my moa and then my mocha and then uh Alicia is one on the right there if you didn't recognize those two. We also have tinanga which is about sovereignty, autonomy and control. You probably recognize this one from titangi. Technology can either enable or restrict this. So open source systems exemplified by koha directly enable tinanga. Communities can modify the software to fit local needs, avoid vendor lockin and maintain control over their own data and technological future. And something that's special about the Koha open source community as well is that the users of the system, the libraries and other organizations actually have control in how it develops and how it becomes enhanced over time through being able to directly request features or bug fixes and in some cases even being able to build those themselves. And we've run a number of workshops with our libraries and helps them make their own contributions to the software they use every day which is really incredible and something that is very unique to open source software. I just before I start on this one I just want to touch back on the kiteyaki tango as well. One of the the we can just leave it like that. One of the neat things around kohhatu is that it's well a lot of open source um software is that it's low resource intensive. We we heard earlier this morning about how much resources AI and stuff use. When you run data centers and you put all well a data center is essentially a fridge. So you're building a big fridge to cool stuff down. Then you put a whole lot of stuff in there that heats it up which you put a whole lot of servers in that generate heat. The more servers you put in there the more cooling you have to put it down. By building a system that can run in a distributed and local fashion, you avoid that. So we not only does the kiteaki tongue of people but of the tale and stuff as well by choosing systems that are lower resource intensive. So onto my other passion one of my many um mai data sovereignty. So the concept of of MAI data sovereignty or even indeed indigenous data sovereignty is crucial um for MAI MAI data sovereignty asserts the right of of us as MAI to govern MAI data data from about or impacting MAI as a Tonga. So in the definition we kind of use it. digital or digitizable data from our from us our pheninoa our manga our tal so there's you'd be incredibly rare to find a data set created in alteor that isn't got isn't either fully multi data or has a large component on so you can kind of almost think of it in your head as doing proper data sovereignty um so what kind of technological features support this kind of um move towards mai data sovereignty. So in the in the Timmana um there's six poe that third one of them the first one is which we touched on. So systems that allow local hosting within aliodor like koha like other open source systems keep uh the data here um and they keep it under local governance respecting sovereignty. So one of the things that people may or may not be aware of with the moves of these mega corporations like Microsoft and stuff to open data centers here that doesn't solve the problem because the US have an act called the cloud act which means that if you're a US company your data is under US jurisdiction no matter where in the world it is. This came about because they wanted some emails. Microsoft had them in Dublin. They refused to give them to them so they made a law saying that you have to. So essentially if you put your starter stuff in Amazon, Google, Microsoft, whether they have a data center here or not, it still comes under US legal jurisdiction as well. So that's where this uh allowing you to host where you want to host is vitally important. And I think in the change in the crisis that we are in as a world at the moment and the the role that some of these corporations are playing and ongoing genocides in Gaza and and the surveillance technology and that do we want to be hosting with them as well? So I I argue not. So that's a whole other tangent. Ask me about that at lunch. Um but also it allows for kitiaki tanga. So they allow for us to implement tikka based rules of access and control. Um rather than rules that have come from an external uh context. So they align with you can align them with ethical frameworks such as the care framework that came out of the first nations in in Canada which is collective benefit authority responsibility and ethics but you could also uh align them with um what's shown here the multi data governance model um another really important thing in supporting data sovereignty is the is the context or the papapa of the data no data point is a data point everything is contextual and related to everything else everything came from somewhere. Everything's going somewhere. Everything is related to everything around it. And without what they call um provenence or metadata, you can't do that properly. So allowing a system that allows you to record it in the way that works for your context for for a mild context for ideally even for like hapu level context is is great and it allows you to maintain those relationships. So the the model like um I don't know if you've read it but it's only 74 pages. You can probably read it over lunch if you want. The Marty data governance model is a really good way of of um working through that. Um so in there it points out things like needs supportive infrastructure. It needs um in that whole data infrastructure, it needs software that respects that uh element, but it also goes through how you collect, reuse, um and distribute. Um so there's a but the underlying one which you probably can't read, data classification is the one that underlies them all. If you don't know what data you have, how do you care for it correctly? So technology like Koha can help provide the infrastructure but true sovereignty requires community-led governance. It requires hapu um and wled governance. Um the technology can only go so far. I think that's me. So indigenous languages like t mai are tonga technology can play a vital role in their revitalization or fakangar systems designed with multilingual capabilities from the ground up are essential. How can they support languages like til one of the ways that koha does this is through interface translation allowing users to interact entirely in their language which moves us beyond tokenism. systems like Kohaa achieve this through community translation efforts. Uh another way is through bilingual or multilingual cataloging. So Koha supports standards like mark which allow describing resources in multiple languages within the same record. And another way is through culturally relevant knowledge organization. So Koha enables the use of indigenous subject headings like namuku to reflect indigenous worldviews. Although practical implementation of this can be challenging. Uh I remember going in my school library looking for stories about Maui and having to go to the um myths and legends section. This is what that's speaking to. It's understanding what um culturally relevant knowledge looks like and how to organize it in a catalog that is respectful uh and also which is the whole point of the library to make it accessible to the people who are looking for it. Truly supporting language involves more than translation. It requires integrating indigenous perspectives into how knowledge itself is organized. Flexible platforms like Koha offer pathways for this deeper work. Oh, I should talk about what's on the screen. Um, so this is a screenshot from um the Koha record editor and it's showing a drop down of languages which um come from a plug-in that we built for one of our libraries in Australia. They have a lot of content that is in indigenous uh Australian and tourist straight islander languages and they wanted to be able to um present on the record what languages those were. Um and so with um through partnership with them, we created this plug-in which meant that they could filter in a bunch of um all of these languages um and present that content in a way that made sense to the people who need to know. Uh so that was um something that was only possible again because of uh open source and people uh having the motivation to make this kind of information accessible. So, one of the neat things for me is is like I I was chatting with some people um the other day about sorry um that it I never would have thought 26 years ago sitting in Levin talking to Joe that I would have been in Marles which is uh where I was a couple weeks ago working on the same library system and stuff as well. So it's this global community that that has grown out of uh something that started here in Alteor. So communitydriven technology often f follow fs global uh connections a digital fonga tonga if you will um the story of kohar is a great example of this from its origins in alier from the horinoa it's spread globally it's now used in over 19,000 libraries around the world um you can kind of see those are all the dots I don't know where that one up there is I I feel like someone just put the wrong GPS coordinates for that. I'm fairly sure there's not. Unless that's an oil rig. Who knows? Um it could be. So yeah, we have cowards on every continent except Antarctica. There's two libraries there. It'll it'll happen. Um even if I have to go down and do it myself, but it'll happen. Um but yeah, it's grown. There's amazing stories. The whole of Turkey use it on one cluster. So that's 1,129 libraries on one cluster. Um, so you've got a consistent experience through the whole of of Turkey. Um, this the little one kind of that one that's Ulan Batar Public Library. That's the capital of Mongolia. So there's some really neat libraries using it. Um, and so it's created kind of this worldwide community um, connected by shared values and and software. I was talking to some of the other developers um last month and they were asking was it an intentional thing and it kind of wasn't although it was so by choosing the name and by the way we released and the way we talk about and the way we bring the community into the into the software project we kind of embedded these these values of manaki tanga and mahitahi and all these kind of things not through necessarily consciously doing it but that was just the way we worked so it just kind have imbued through the project. Um, so the other neat thing that we've uh that we do is we have Kohakon which is an annual conference and it's the kind of the community's hoie. It rotates globally um and returns to Alteor periodically. Um I made a rule and I wrote it on the wiki in 2006 that we can't have the same conference and I can't be in the same continent within 3 years. That was just cuz I wanted to travel. Um, and it works. It's worked really well. So, it's been everywhere. It's been Nigeria, it's been Argentina, it's been Greece, it's been uh the Philippines. Um, yeah, it's here in November here in Wellington. So, um, 2025.org. Um, and you're welcome to come along, but it it works in the way that we as Mai know you have to sustain and build relationships, eating and drinking together, talking and building those relationships. And that allows for discussions, arguments to take place and not go wrong. Um, if someone's just a faceless email address, it's quite easy to be mean to them. But if they're the person who sat next to you and shared their dinner with you in in Nigeria, then that's a person. So it it that personalization. There's a lot you can do digitally. You can't feel someone's wide. You can't really feel their aua over a screen. So that that sitting next to each other is still really important. And I think that's the thing that has made Koha last 25 years when so many other projects have have come and gone in the meantime. So values-driven community-led technology projects face unique challenges or wid balancing diverse global user needs with specific foundational cultural values is a constant negotiation and large open source projects. Authentically embedding deep cultural concepts like tikka and maldi into software requires ongoing dialogue and care avoiding superficiality. So, this is just speaking to what Chris just talked about um with Koha Khan and with these Kanohi Kit Kohi meetings. And the picture on this slide is another one of those. It's um Chris at the Marseilles Hackfest just a few weeks ago. Um and it just demonstrates how much value there is in bringing these people together to talk about software because that room was packed. Um and it's where some of our biggest problems get solved and some of our coolest ideas get created. um resource constraints can limit the ability of institutions to fully leverage the customizability offered by open systems. So na fakamoa future pathways what's next for culturally grounded technology deepening support for indigenous data sovereignty aligning with those care principles supporting mechanisms like TK labels and integrating with sovereign infrastructure using stories like Koha as a model for decolonizing technology proving that this software can be built differently and fostering indigenous techn technological leadership solution that are built for us and by us. So the the journey of koha our case study illustrates how technology can be intentionally interwoven with cultural values like manaki tonga kiteyaki tonga and tina fostering global phonga while supporting local needs. It challenges that myth of of technological neutrality and offers a a real example of how systems can be developed to support rather than erase cultural identity and self-determination. So the core message that we're leaving with you with today is that grounding our digital stewardship systems and indigenous values and data sovereignty principles enables us to serve our communities more effectively and ethically. And we really implore you to ask whose values does the technology that we use embody? How can we build and choose technologies that better reflect our diverse communities and the cultural treasures we serve? Naminui. Thank you. Um I think we've got four minutes for questions. maybe k I'll come in to do some question stuff. Um, thank you so much. Um, everyone, the Q&A portion of this takes place through Slido, which is on the QR code on your name badge. So, please go there to submit your cues for us to a um I'll start off if that's all right while they come in. You were talking about uh data's centers being located within Arrow and being owned locally. Um recently France and Germany have uh joined forces to create an alternative to Google Docs that is uh locally owned. In what way do the sort of the the failings of big tech becoming more apparent create opportunities for these sorts of more locally owned and locally led projects? Um I'll start and then I know Chris will have more to say. Um, one of the key opportunities that that presents for us is that we know that the um, knowledge and experiences and mindsets that they these big big tech corporations have when they're um, creating solutions like this is that they are different from ours. And so the New Zealand tech sector and the New Zealand information sector has an opportunity to upskill ourselves and um be present in that conversation and make sure that we're not following and adopting the same um software and algorithms and um knowledge patterns that they're putting out in the world just because they're there. Ours are different. Ours are valuable to us for different cultural reasons. So, this is an opportunity for us to make sure that we're in that conversation creating solutions that match our values and our um our mindsets. Yeah, Alicia knows me well. We've worked together for how many years now? Nine, 10, something. Yeah, Alicia first started at Catalyst when she was 16 as part of our academy and never left. Um, she's now taking my job. Um, and I'm wearing the same shirt in that photo. Uh, it's it was on purpose. Let's just go there. Um so yeah, no I think Alicia kind of summed it up. It's it's a it's an opportunity to resist the digital colonialism like there is a homogeneity over the internet. Uh English is the predominant language and American and and western ideals are the predominant ways of thinking and stuff and we have an opportunity to uh not buy into that. Um I think there's massive value in in respecting other ways of thinking and and viewing knowledge as well. Awesome. I will come in to read a question off the screen. Uh, how does tonga work practically within your systems? How do you avoid superficiality and utilize indigenous values within a practical setting? Just a small one. Okay. Yeah, just a little one. Um, there's there will be a little presentation this afternoon that touches on that as well um from Tibui um in the audience there and an a little bit touches on it. Um but basically it does it the technology itself doesn't it allows you to so it doesn't restrict you from doing it but as like as we mentioned it it needs to be a community effort that tikka needs to be baked into the organization that's using it um and it needs so what we don't want to do is force you to work a certain way with the technology we want the technology to be able to work how you want to work it's on you to bring that tikka into your organization and then into the technology if that makes sense. Excellent. And one last one. Uh are there applications for Koha beyond libraries? Yes. Um so Koha is basically a very very basically a massive database. Um it can be used to store information about anything. So libraries uh that was the traditional and original intention for it. Um, but if there's something that you have a bunch of and you want to be able to track information about it and potentially its movements, then Koha is applicable. So, it's uh it can be used for stock management. Uh, it can be used in galleries and archives and museums. Um, at Catalyst, we have Pokémon in our koha. Um, anything that you want to store and store metadata about is um, useful. Uh, Koha can be used for. Be creative. You use it for something and then tell me what you did. Excellent. Uh, thank you so much. A huge round of applause of Amazing Tech.