all right I can actually the the Iraq
this is the first time in about thirty
years that Kilauea has stopped erupting
so alright so my talk is about offline
peer-to-peer mapping and some work that
I've been doing for I don't know four
years now
geez it's been a long time so my slides
are online if you want to check them out
later I've got a lot of links at the end
so this is me I'm a member of bits co-op
we do consulting work as a worker owned
cooperative and I've been working with
this nonprofit NGO Digital democracy
since 2015 or so building these
peer-to-peer mapping tools used by
indigenous communities so the groups
that I'm going to be focusing on are
based out of Guyana and Ecuador with
Alianza Sabo in the Ecuador region of
the Amazon and also into Peru a little
bit here's a map of that just to give
you some idea so I also got the
opportunity to travel to Guyana to meet
some of the environmental monitoring
team there and the mapping team so I'm
gonna start with some of the issues
facing the the wattage on communities
nations in Guyana in the South Rupununi
it's near Brazil so there's a huge
problem right there right now with gold
mining both illegal and also through
mining concessions so the environmental
monitoring team that we've been working
with has reported over 250 observations
of illegal activity or harmful activity
the mercury gets into the water supplies
damage to cultural sites sacred sites
deforestation there's a lot of problems
with this kind of extractive industry
and at here at the end over 50 percent
of those have been caused by this mining
activity in the wattage on right now are
working
they're in talks with the government of
Guyana to push back against this
Canadian gold mining company that wants
to come in and mine
Rudy Mountain which is a site of
considerable cultural significance so
here's here's a quote from Ron James the
the sort of person who does a lot of
mapping work with ArcGIS and like lugs a
bunch of maps when he goes when he takes
the plane ride from Georgetown to let
them and you know also is doing a lot of
good work with plotters and that's
difficult on generator power and I'm
just gonna read this quote really fast
because I think it's important to quote
directly from our partners that we work
with so by mapping the mining pollution
sources we now understand how it affects
wider river systems and water supplies
that are essential to our villages for
fishing bathing and drinking we're
bringing this monitoring information to
the attention of the environmental and
mining authorities yet the problem
continues unabated and to give you some
more idea of what we're talking about
here so this is a map of the whole map
pretty much is the traditional
territorial extent of the Whopper Chang
and the blue areas are formal titles
that have been granted by the government
and down there in pink are the mining
the existing mining concessions that
they've had to deal with and Maruti
mountain where this new bout of gold
mining that they're organizing to resist
is in an area that the one of the
communities in the middle I Shelton is
requested a territorial extension for it
and it's you know it's it's a
complicated difficult political problem
but importantly this work has been going
on for a while since 2000 this
particular mapping effort so it's not I
think it's important for technologists
like me who want to work on these
projects that you're coming when
presence is requested for technical
assistance and kind of just listening
and understand
and working with existing political
projects so the other another group that
digital democracy has been partnered
with is Alianza Sabo this is a group
that operates out of Ecuador and the
main problem for the Huaorani and also
the kafan and other groups in the area
is oil Maya is oil drilling and so
there's been drilling since about the
60s and it causes all kinds of problems
as you can imagine like damage to
ecosystems deforestation and the new
concessions that are going in are for
block 22 and this is something that the
Huaorani and other communities in
Alianza sabo and also neighboring areas
are trying very hard to resist and their
message is quite clear our message for
the oil companies our land is not for
sale
and so here is a map that they put
together and I'm going to start to talk
about how this map was put together so
this map is really cool this is a map of
Huaorani traditional territory and here
is a village this is an interactive map
that the Huaorani have chosen to publish
to share with the world hopefully to
share with you you can see that there's
a lot going on in this map we've got
we've got the locations of important
plants for making thatched roof we've
got tapir tracks Jaguar tracks important
medicinal plants here with a tree with
the plus where snakes sometimes occur
the locations of villages this one is
really cool you can't see it too well
but that's a cell phone icon and so this
is a location where you can pick up a
cell phone signal maybe you have to hold
it in the air or maybe you have to stand
on top of a car to get it but you can
get it and that's really important
because if someone in the community gets
a snakebite and they don't have any
anti-venom then they can call for a
helicopter to come in and hopefully save
someone's life
so this map is
there's a link to it in the in the notes
it's you can see this is quite full of
resources but if you look on a
government map this area is empty they
don't put things like you know where
these important resources are on their
maps and this gives the Huaorani and
other groups an important bargaining
tool for talks with the government to
stroh hey we are using this land for
these important purposes and we don't
want this extractive industry to come in
and you know and harm us so for in terms
of what technology is needed you know
technology in itself is only a tool for
informing these other processes like
local decision making like the community
needs to be well-informed to have
meetings like not only with external
parties like governments but also for
just you know having good information
about your territory part of that is
gathering evidence like with smartphones
looking at the locations of oil spills
and things like that or mining like
mercury equipment and also preserving
traditional knowledge is an important
component of this especially with the
older generation passing on and the
younger generation in many cases
unfortunately moving to the cities
without without learning these things so
technology tools are useful for kind of
preserving that knowledge before it
might be lost so there's two main
components for these technology tools
there's the mapping components and then
the environmental monitoring components
so for the mapping tools loading
satellite imagery so that people can you
know trace our rivers and paths and the
locations the villages is pretty
important and like I said paper maps are
also a big important component of this
any maps that are made it's good to have
a hard copy because hard copies work
very well offline
in these in these sorts of environments
you can pass them out to families in the
villages and you can also you know
document the locations of important
traditional medicines or important
cultural cultural sites that's that sort
of thing so in in terms of environmental
monitoring that might consist of taking
photos or taking video gathering GPS
coordinates with GPS proper GPS devices
and smart phones because the sensors
aren't quite as good and also taking
like quick notes either sometimes via
text but often voices is a bit easier
when you're out doing the field work and
some of the communities are also using
drones to do aerial surveys a big
problem with this work which is sort of
what what I and what digital democracy
has been working on is kind of shoring
up the shortcomings with tools that are
broadly available so tool professional
GIS tools are quite difficult to learn
the learning curve is very steep they're
generally not collaborative so you know
you can't involve a whole community or
you can involve neighboring communities
in with a big group mapping project and
very often there are poor online
assumptions like some of the drone the
drone imaging tools require an internet
uplink for the purposes of you know
having a licensing tracker thingy and it
just doesn't really work very well if
you've got a really spotty solo signal
or if you have a satellite internet that
has an aggressive cap so there's also
power sources are a big challenge so
most of the villages have solar panels
and like many of family homes have small
solar panels or people often like use
their motorbike or they use their truck
to power like cell phones usually
sometimes small laptops internet access
is difficult it's quite expensive most
of the villages like in Guyana have a
village office that has a satellite
blink but they're they after you go over
a certain point like 20 gigabytes it
just stops working completely so you
know if there's a new Android update
available and all of the phone's
individually download the exact same
data maybe like 20 times then you've
spent your whole cap for the month so
it's it's quite challenging working with
those sorts of constraints and also the
devices themselves have to be quite
durable you might drop your phone in a
river or ants are a huge problem we have
this problem on the Big Island - ants
love electronics they live to like get
in there and lay a bunch of eggs and
I've had SDR card full of ants this
happens quite often so these these tools
have to work offline they have to be
able to collect important information
and they have to be easy to learn and
that also means that they have to be
easy to teach so these communities
ideally should be teaching each other
they shouldn't have to rely on these
external parties to kind of come in and
swoop in and and do things that that's
not a very good way to set up this this
sort of a project which is anti-colonial
in nature so you really don't want to be
reproducing that kind of dynamic as much
as possible and it's important too that
the map presets are based on local
knowledge so all of the maps in the
Huaorani map that i just showed you were
designed by the local community on paper
and then a designer came in and made SVG
versions of those so here's a great
quote from Tessa
who's the monitoring coordinator in
Guyana for the septa technology changes
every day and I'd like to learn more
about developing software and writing
commands because right now we are
dependent on people coming from the
outside to do this for us
it's kind of an important power
dimension to be aware of that
technologists have these skills that
that put us in a position of privilege
and power and it's important to point at
that and think about how to remedy it
and Tessa is great and she's already
running Linux and learning programming
another important consideration with
this is that the data belongs to
communities it's not the sort of we kind
of have this idea of open data that can
be quite problematic if you're putting a
sacred site on a map means that a bunch
of vandals will show up which happens
then or you know if you're pointing if
you're including the locations where
gold can be found you certainly don't
want to have a gold rush coming on to
indigenous territory and causing all
kinds of problems
so it's important that the communities
decide how their data is shared so as
far as data transfer goes for these
projects there's of course the internet
but it has caps with satellite service
or sometimes cell phone service and
sometimes the cell phone service is
using the satellite network or people
might drive into like the next big town
like in to let them or into a town
that's on the road system in Ecuador USB
drives are fantastic way to transfer
data in these environments and our
database our peer-to-peer database tools
work really well with USB drives you
might have a local offline router or
Bluetooth or etc ADB is also a fantastic
tool for communicating with an Android
smartphone you can copy files and you
can do a lot of you can run unix
commands on the phone so we've been
using that a lot to install to install
the software onto the devices okay so
why given all of that background context
why does peer-to-peer p2p makes sense
for this kind of a problem space well
importantly there's no critical or
privileged devices so nothing that can't
get lost in a river can't get covered in
ants you know you have many devices
making writes offline and everybody
every device has a backup and the
devices can talk to each other in this
kind of a network called the gossip
network in order to transfer information
you have implicit backups and it's it's
pretty great
so the tool that I've been working
partly on mostly in the database layer
is
called Matteo it's for desktop and
mobile it uses ID editor which is a tool
for OpenStreetMap and so the data model
for OpenStreetMap is used in ID editor
and we have some glares iOS and p2p DB
that use peer-to-peer techniques so just
to give you a quick idea of what that
looks like here's a just a quick
screenshot of the tool to make an
offline peer-to-peer network you can use
this thing called a CAPA architecture
that's where you have an append-only log
tools like git have this sort of
structure internally also and you build
materialized views on top of that log
things that might be like a key value
store or a spatial index for mapping
data we use the Open Street Map model
because a lot of the tools are based on
that so it has nose nodes ways and
relations and here's some examples of
that we do have to kind of change this
model a little bit so for example IDs
you can't monotonically increase IDs
because two devices might try to create
the same ID so what you can do is
generate very long cryptographically
random IDs instead for that versions
also have a similar problem so you can
use the hash of the previous document or
you can use the location in a in a
vector clock like the sequence number in
your version entries and with this few
small changes like this you can build
these kind of networks so awesome pizza
P was our first iteration it uses an
appendant log based on this tool NPM
module called hyper log and we have some
materialized views for a KB store a join
model that kind of lets you deal with
more normalized data like osm data is
and spatial index that kdb tree the
thing is with peer to peer with this
kind of gossip network right performance
is actually very important because every
time that two devices sync up you have
to write all of the records in and we
got to the point where with one of the
prototypes it was taking 15 minutes to
sync a database with about a quarter
million records on it and so for the the
new version that's right performance has
been really important and here's some of
the components in the new
version other future applications
include building unordered materialized
views so things that were kind of out of
order because that's useful if you need
to use encryption to kind of have a
sharing model that where you might want
to also have remote backups and not
necessarily share that information with
the whole public so here in the in the
slide notes I'm gonna skip over this
real quick but have just a quick example
of like how you can build this kind of a
key value materialized view if you're
interested and it's important to think
of it in terms of like you might think
about it get repo where you can have
Forks of the data and then also tools
for merging the content back into place
spatial index are a big part of this
work because they have to work really
fast have to work really well offline
everything that we've done is built on
the debt project tools like hyper core
and random access storage modules and as
far as future work goes the sparse
replication is also a big element of
this because as these databases grow
then you can't store the entire database
on a single device so as far as future
work goes we've also recently got a
grant for this other related project
called peer maps and this is matéo the
tool also got a 50k grant from Samsung
so get to work on this more full time
and as far as the database go as far as
the project goes this is more of a tool
for building something that can take in
all of the planet awesome the
OpenStreetMap data and kind of
distributed over these peer-to-peer
networks in a way that's also going to
benefit the mapping work with matéo
because a lot of the core components are
the same so and this is just a great
quote I wanted to end on this is from
Opie our mapping coordinator I just want
to read it really fast we wrote you why
Ronnie like my pay oh because it is an
open program and it's not too difficult
to learn it's been really helpful to us
to allow us to manage or
mapping program and for the first time
people in all the villages including the
local technicians but also even the
elders who don't speak Spanish or know
how to read have been able to understand
it it is also the first program we've
ever seen where we can use our own icons
for things and for it to be in our own
language rather than in English or
Spanish with Matteo we have for the
first time a tool that we can use to
make our own maps and we can build a
strong team of people who can train
others to map the mapping project has
United many villages to defend and
manage their lands together and it is a
process which is leaving a legacy for
the future both the maps and the skills
that our people can use to fight for our
livelihoods and our rights and I have a
bunch of links if you're interested in
more of the projects and also in some of
the activism here locally on Hawaii
that's indigenous life thank you very
much
[Applause]