All right, I can Actually the this is the first time In about 30 years that killer wave has stopped erupting.

So All right, 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.

Jeez, it's been a long time.

S o.

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.

Start Coop.

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 pretty pure mapping tools used by indigenous communities.

So the groups that I'm gonna be focusing on our based out of Guyana and Ecuador with Elian's a, say, bo 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 got the opportunity to travel to guy on Earth to meet some of the environmental monitoring team there in the mapping team.

So I'm gonna start with some of the issues facing the the weapon.

John Communities nations in Ghana in the South Loop Ernie, 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, uh, at here at the end, over 50% of those have been caused by this mining activity in the weapons.

John right now are working there in talks with the government of Guyana to push back against this Canadian gold mining company that wants to come in and mine Moody Mountain, which is a sight of considerable cultural significance.

Um, so here's uh, here's a quote from Ron James, the the sort of person who does a lot of mapping work with RGs and, like lugs ah, bunch of maps when he goes when he takes the plane ride from Georgetown, Toe left him.

And, uh, you know also is doing a lot of work with plotters, and that's difficult on generator power.

Uh, and I'm just gonna read this court 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 effects whiter river systems and water supplies that are essential to our villages for fishing, bathing and drinking.

Uh, 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 operation.

In the blue areas are formal titles that have been granted by the government.

And down there in pink, uh, are the mining, the existing mining concessions that they've had to deal with, And Maruti Mountain, where this new out 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, uh 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 coming when presence is requested for technical assistance and kind of just listening and understanding and working with existing, uh, political projects.

So the other, another group that digital democracy has been partnered with is Alleanza, say, Bo.

This is a group that operates out of Ecuador, and the main problem for the Rani and also the Kal'fahn and other groups in the area is, uh is oil drilling.

And so there's been oil drilling since about the sixties, and it causes all kinds of problems, as you can imagine, damaged ecosystems, deforestation and the new concessions that air going in our for block 22.

And this is something that the Guarani and other communities in Alleanza say Bo and also neighboring areas are trying very hard to resist.

Um, and their message is quite clear.

Our message for the oil companies are land is not for sale.

And so, uh, here is a map that they put together, and I'm gonna start to talk about how this map was put together.

So this map is really cool.

This is a map of irony.

Traditional territory on here is a village.

This is an interactive map that the wire any have chosen to publish to share with the world Fleet 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 that roof.

We've got tape yer tracks.

Jaguar tracks important medicinal plants here with the tree with the plus, uh, where snakes sometimes occur.

The location's villages.

This one is really cool.

You can't see it, too.

Oh, 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 snake bite and they don't have any anti venom than they can call for a helicopter to come in and hopefully save someone's life.

So this map is, um there's a link to it in the in the notes.

It's you can see this is quite full of resource is, But if you look on a government map, this area is empty.

They don't put things like, you know where these important resource is are on their maps.

And this gives the irony and other groups and important bargaining tool for talks with the government.

Destro, Hey, we're 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 toe have meetings like not only with external parties like governments, but also for just, you know, having good information about your territory.

Uh, part of that is gathering evidence sick with smartphones, looking at the locations of oil spills and things like that were mining like mercury equipment.

Uh, 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, technology tools are useful for kind of preserving that knowledge before it might be lost.

So, uh, 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 trace our rivers and paths and locations, villages is pretty important.

Um, and like I said, paper maps are also a big important component of this.

So any maps that are made, it's good to have a hard copy because heard copies work very well off line 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 like smartphones, because the sensors aren't 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 field work.

And, um, some of the communities are also using drones to do aerial surveys.

A big problem with this work, uh, 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 GS tools are quite difficult to learn.

The learning curve is very steep.

They're generally not collaborative, so you know you can't involve the whole community, or you can involve neighboring communities in with the big group mapping project.

And very often there are poor online assumptions, like some of the drone drone imaging tools require an Internet uplink for the purposes of, you know, having a licensing tracker thingy.

And it's just doesn't really work very well if you've got a really spotty cell signal or if you have satellite Internet that has a aggressive cap.

So there's also, uh, power sources or Big Challenge, S O.

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 powered like cellphones, usually sometimes small laptops.

Internet access is difficult.

It's quite expensive.

Most of the villages, like in Ghana, have a village office that has a satellite uplink.

But there they f you go go over a certain 0.20 gigabytes.

It just stops working completely.

So you know, if there's a new Android update available and all of the phones individually, download this exact same data.

Maybe you 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 huge problem.

We have this problem on the Big Island.

Two ants love electronics.

They love to like get in there and lay a bunch of eggs and had str card full of ants.

This happens quite often eso these.

These tools have to work off line.

I 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 comet swoop in and do things that that's not a very good way to set up this, um, 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 to that.

The map presets air based on local knowledge.

So we left the maps in the wire on the map that I just showed you were designed by the local community on paper, and then a designer came in and made SPG versions of those.

So here's a great quote from Tessa, who's the monitoring coordinator in Guyana for the SEPTA.

Uh, technology changes every day, and I'd like to learn more about developing software and reading commands because right now we're 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, um, 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 Tess is great, and she's already running Lennox and learning programming.

Uh, another important consideration with this is that the datable belongs to communities.

It's not this sort of we kind of have this idea of open data that can be quite problematic if you're putting a sacred site on the map means that a bunch of Vandals will show up.

Which happens then, uh, 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 onto indigenous territory and causing all kinds of problems.

So it's important that the communities decide how their data is shared, so his first 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 ah, people might drive into like the next big town like toe left thumb or into a town that's on the road system in Ecuador, USB drives are fantastic.

Wait to transfer dated in these environments on our database are prepared.

Database tools work really well with USB drives.

You might have a look awful in broader or Bluetooth, et cetera, et TB 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 this offer into the devices.

Okay, so why, given all of that background context, why does peer to peer Petey?

Petey Pete makes sense for this kind of problem.

Space.

Well importantly, there's no critical or privileged devices, so nothing that can't get lost in the river can't get covered in ants.

You know, uh, you have many devices making writes off line 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 data base layer is called my PEO.

It's for desktop and mobile.

It uses I D editor, which is a tool for open street map.

And so the data model for open street map is used.

An I D editor, and we have some layers outlets impede to be D B that used peer to peer techniques.

So just to give you a quick idea of what that looks like, there's a just a quick screen shot of the tool to make on offline peer to peer network.

You can use this thing called Kappa Architecture.

That's where you have independently log tools like Get 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 meant model because a lot of the tools are based on that.

So it has knows, nodes, ways and relations.

And here's some examples of that, uh, we do, if that kind of change this model a little bit.

So, for example, I d s.

You can't monitor Nikolay increase I d.

S because two devices might try to create the same I d.

So what you could do is generate very long rant cryptographic lee random I d.

S.

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 vector clock like the sequence number in your version entries.

And with a few small changes like this, you can build these kind of networks.

So awesome Pizza P was our first iteration.

It uses independently log based on this tool and P M AJ o called hyper log.

And we have some materialized views for a baby store.

Ah, joint model.

That kind of lets you deal with more normalized data like us and data is and, uh, special index, the KGB tree.