From conferences to wānanga: how a Māori GIS community kept finding ways to stay connected

One of the recurring problems with conferences is that they finish just as everybody is getting useful. For two or three days there is energy, conversation, practical demonstrations and people discovering that somebody else has already solved the problem they have been wrestling with for six months. Then everyone packs up, drives or flies home and returns to their own organisation, where Monday morning has been patiently waiting.

The history of Māori GIS over the last two decades is partly a history of finding ways to keep those connections alive after the event. Conferences mattered, but so did the things that appeared between them: practitioner networks, mailing lists, workshops, outreach sessions, online groups, Indigenous Mapping Wānanga and eventually regular Ngā Poutama Matawhenua sessions. The technology changed repeatedly. The underlying need did not. People wanted to find one another, learn from one another and get practical help when the real work started.

Over time I came to understand that the important infrastructure was not really the email list, website, Facebook group or webinar platform. It was whanaungatanga: the relationships between people who kept turning up, shared what they knew, introduced others, hosted events, answered questions and made space for newer practitioners. I do not use that word to claim that I was building Māori relationships according to tikanga. I use it because the ordinary technology language of “networking” does not adequately describe what I observed. The connections were not simply contacts in a database. They carried trust, reciprocity, history and obligations to one another.

That relational quality is one of the things that made the move from conferences toward wānanga important. A conference can transfer information. A wānanga can also create space for collective learning, questioning, kōrero and knowledge moving in more than one direction. The practical Māori GIS community gradually became less about one expert presenting to an audience and more about people bringing their own kaupapa, experience and questions into the room.

Before the conference

By the late 2000s there was already a broad community of Māori GIS practitioners and people working around Māori mapping. The work crossed Treaty research, iwi organisations, government agencies, environmental projects, local authorities, universities, consultancies, Māori land and cultural mapping. Some people were professional GIS specialists. Others used GIS as one part of much larger roles. Some were researchers, planners, environmental staff, project managers or simply the person in their organisation who had gradually become responsible for making the map work.

That diversity mattered because Māori GIS was never one thing. It was not one software package and it did not belong to one profession. A Treaty claimant mapping project had different needs from an environmental monitoring project. A place-name project asked different questions from cadastral analysis. A hapū trying to organise information about its whenua could need very different tools from a government agency publishing national data.

The kaupapa also shaped the technology. That distinction became increasingly important to me. In conventional IT projects the platform is often chosen first and people then work out how to fit the activity into it. In Māori GIS the better conversations often started somewhere else: what is the kaupapa, who holds the knowledge, who needs the capability and what should the technology enable? The same software might be useful in several projects, but it did not define what those projects were for.

What practitioners often shared was the difficulty of working in relative isolation. Specialist GIS conferences existed, but Māori GIS questions were not always central there. Māori conferences existed, but technical mapping could be only one small part of a wider programme. There was value in having a space where mapping itself, and the relationships around mapping, could be discussed directly.

The Māori GIS Conference in Christchurch in 2009 became an important point in that development. Huia Pacey was a central organiser and proponent, with support from Eagle Technology and a wider group of people who saw the value of bringing the community together. More than one hundred people attended, spanning iwi, Māori practitioners, government, research, local authorities and the private sector.

My own involvement was mainly around promotion and the wider network. What I remember most strongly from that period is not one person founding something. It is the sense that a community which already existed in fragments became more visible to itself. Practitioners discovered who else was doing the work, where similar problems were being tackled and who they might call when they encountered something unfamiliar.

That visibility matters. People can spend years reinventing a solution because they do not know that someone two regions away has already learnt the lesson the hard way. Bringing the community together allowed experience to circulate rather than repeatedly being lost inside individual projects.

After everyone leaves

The conference immediately created another question: how do people keep talking? A Māori GIS Google Group was established after the 2009 conference, giving practitioners a simple way to circulate opportunities, useful links, questions and event information. It was technologically modest, which was one of its strengths. People did not have to learn a complex new platform. Messages simply arrived through email.

There is a lesson there that I have seen repeated many times since. Community technology works best when it reduces the distance between the person with a question and the person who may be able to help. The sophisticated platform is not necessarily the one that strengthens the community. Sometimes the best tool is the one that stays out of the way.

A second Māori GIS conference followed in 2010 at GNS Avalon in Lower Hutt. Huia Pacey, Roland Pomana, Gina Mohi, Tony Elson and others contributed across the broader organising effort, while I worked on programme production, presentation coordination, practical delivery and a session on managing Māori GIS projects.

That work taught me another useful lesson. Much of what sustains a community is invisible labour. Someone has to organise the programme, chase the speaker, check the venue, sort out the timing, make sure the equipment works, answer questions, welcome people and notice the person who has arrived alone and does not yet know anybody. The practical work of manaakitanga is not captured by the conference programme, but it shapes whether people feel that they belong in the room.

The same is true online. A successful community forum looks effortless to most users because somebody else is moderating it, answering questions and keeping the activity moving. The technology does not create the sense of community on its own. People do.

Te Kāhui Manu Hōkai

The activity around the conferences contributed to the development of Te Kāhui Manu Hōkai, the Māori GIS association and practitioner network. Like most volunteer organisations, it did not emerge fully formed on one magical date. Meetings happened, a name developed, governance structures evolved, people took on roles and the practical machinery of an organisation gradually appeared.

The value of Te Kāhui Manu Hōkai was not simply that it created another incorporated body. It gave the Māori GIS community some continuity between projects and employers. People could change jobs without disappearing from the practitioner network. Knowledge did not have to remain locked inside one agency, consultancy or iwi project.

That continuity can be understood in ordinary professional terms as capability retention, but there was also a whakapapa to the practice developing over time. People learnt from earlier projects and passed those lessons into later ones. New practitioners entered a network with some memory of what had already happened. Conferences, workshops and conversations became points in a longer lineage of practice rather than isolated events.

I use whakapapa carefully here. A practitioner network is not whakapapa in the same sense as the relationships between people, whenua and tīpuna. But the concept helped me recognise something that ordinary project language misses: knowledge has a lineage. Ideas come from somewhere. Methods are inherited, modified and passed on. Good practice should remember who contributed to it rather than presenting every new initiative as if it appeared from nowhere.

My own role changed through this period. At first I was often the technical helper, supporting websites, systems, event material and practical delivery. Later I was more directly involved in komiti activity. Others brought cultural leadership, relationships, te reo, networks, sponsorship, event organisation and practitioner experience. The community worked because people brought different strengths rather than because everyone was expected to play the same role.

Monday morning again

As useful as conferences were, they exposed the same problem repeatedly. A participant could learn a great deal during the event and still return home to an environment where nobody else understood what they were trying to do. This pushed some of the work toward smaller practical workshops and teaching.

In 2011 I contributed GIS and mapping practice to Cultural Mapping teaching at Victoria University. In 2012 and 2013, after I moved into DOC, practical Māori GIS and geospatial outreach sessions increasingly focused on what happened after the initial exposure to the technology. Managing Māori GIS Projects workshops combined mapping with project questions: who has authority over the information, who maintains the system, what happens when the GIS person leaves, how public and sensitive information are separated and what will still work in five or ten years.

Those questions were not the sort that filled software conference brochures, but they determined whether a community GIS project survived. A geospatial outreach workshop in Wellington in 2013 attracted around forty registrations and a waiting list. That demand made it clear that people wanted practical access to tools and people who could help them use those tools.

The workshop itself was never enough. The learning had to travel home with the participant.

This is where the idea of ako increasingly influenced how I thought about training. I might arrive as the GIS specialist, but I was never the only person bringing knowledge. Participants brought local knowledge, environmental experience, organisational realities, histories and relationships with the whenua that I did not have. The stronger sessions were reciprocal. People learnt the technical method and I learnt why my example did not fit their reality, what I had overlooked or what the software did not represent well.

That kind of correction is not a disruption to training. It is part of the learning.

Indigenous Mapping Wānanga

The Indigenous Mapping Wānanga that developed from 2014 brought this practical approach together with international Indigenous mapping experience. The Firelight Group in Canada had an established Indigenous Mapping Workshop lineage, with Steven DeRoy among the important people in that work. Google Earth Outreach had international trainers and tools. In Aotearoa, Māori organisations, practitioners, Digital Navigators, government agencies and others helped adapt and host the approach locally.

The 2014 workshop at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi in Whakatāne was oversubscribed. That was a significant signal. The issue was no longer whether people were interested in GIS. The problem was accommodating the demand.

Participants could bring real projects and practical needs. Training was not merely a tour through software menus. The value came from connecting tools with kaupapa people were already working on. That distinction became more important as the wānanga developed. A community training event should not exist to demonstrate how impressive a platform is. It should exist because people have mahi they are trying to advance.

The shift from conference to wānanga also changed the social shape of the event. The room was not only an audience facing a stage. People talked to one another, worked through problems, brought examples and continued conversations outside the formal sessions. The relationships formed around the work were part of the capability.

Claudelands

By 2017 the Indigenous Mapping Wānanga at Claudelands in Hamilton had become a large collaborative event involving Digital Navigators, Waikato-Tainui, Google Earth Outreach, Te Kereru Associates, LINZ, Firelight Group and a broader group of organisers and trainers. I was heavily involved through LINZ in technical leadership, programme delivery and troubleshooting.

The wānanga also produced one of the more memorable technical lessons of the period: the venue internet did not cope well with the amount of cloud-based mapping we were trying to do. A room full of people opening mapping platforms simultaneously is a brutally honest Wi-Fi test. The glossy venue description may say one thing. One hundred participants trying to load imagery at once will provide another opinion.

Connections struggled, trainers improvised and the event continued. The issue became serious enough afterwards that the venue hire was refunded. At the time it was frustrating. With some distance, it became a useful symbol of the whole capability problem. We had global cloud mapping tools and international trainers, but none of that helped when the local infrastructure could not deliver enough connectivity into the room.

What kept the event working was not the platform. It was people helping one another, changing exercises, sharing connections, explaining things another way and carrying on. That is easy to overlook in technology stories because the failure of the Wi-Fi is more visible than the whanaungatanga that allows a room to work around it.

The lesson carried into 2018, when the wānanga used a broader mix of tools including Google products, QGIS, Esri Survey123 and Mapbox. Another Rangatahi Day was part of the programme. The widening toolset was important because the objective was not to bind people to one software ecosystem. It was to expose people to choices and help them understand enough of the underlying GIS to choose what suited their kaupapa.

Rangatahi and continuity

The Rangatahi Days added another dimension that deserves more attention than a simple attendance number. Capability is not only about solving today's problem. It is also about who will carry the work next. Bringing rangatahi into mapping created opportunities to connect technical skills with place, environment and community histories in ways that could continue beyond one event.

Again, I was there as a technical practitioner, not as the person providing the cultural knowledge. The value came from combining different strengths. GIS could help rangatahi explore and represent place. The meaning of that place came from somewhere much deeper than the software.

This intergenerational dimension changed the way I looked at capability. A project is usually measured within a financial year. Whenua and community relationships are not. If the skills, knowledge and authority around a GIS can move between generations, the work has a much better chance of remaining useful when the current platform has long since disappeared.

Place and people

Te Kāhui Manu Hōkai continued its own related but distinct path. By 2018 there was active discussion about its role and future direction, and in 2019 PLACE19 in Rotorua continued the Māori GIS conference lineage. Roland Pomana, Gina Mohi, Jonathan Procter, Liliana Clarke, Takerei Norton, Wendy Shaw and many others contributed across a programme dealing with mapping, place names, technology, data and Māori GIS practice.

By then the technical environment had changed enormously from 2009. Web mapping was routine. Government open data was much easier to obtain. QGIS had become a serious option. Three-dimensional visualisation was accessible on ordinary computers and mobile data collection was becoming easier. Yet the community question remained the same: where do people go after the event when they need help?

That question was increasingly being answered online.

The online years

A Māori GIS Facebook Page was active by 2016, and a Māori GIS Facebook Group was active by early 2017. I set up and administered the group, and it became a practical space for sharing events, questions, datasets, maps and technical help. Facebook worked largely because people were already there. Māori GIS appeared in the stream of everything else they were doing.

That made the group very different from a formal association. It was immediate and conversational. Someone could ask a question in the morning and potentially have useful answers before lunch. Facebook Live extended this further. By 2018 I was running live Māori GIS sessions online around 3D mapping, storytelling, virtual reality and related GIS tools. People did not need to travel or wait for a national conference. They could join because the topic was useful that evening.

The useful part was not simply reach. Online sessions began to normalise the idea that learning could be ongoing rather than episodic. They also lowered some of the status barriers around training. A person could watch quietly, ask a question in chat or return to a recording later. That made participation easier for people who might not have walked into a professional GIS conference and identified themselves as a GIS practitioner.

Around 2020 I deliberately stepped back from much of the Facebook administration, partly because a community that depends permanently on one person is not much of a community. My attention shifted toward a more structured model of practical online learning. The Facebook group later disappeared, but the more important story is that the learning model had already moved on.

Ngā Poutama Matawhenua

Ngā Poutama Matawhenua was operating as a practical online Māori GIS mapping wānanga by October 2020. The programme grew from the same needs that had driven much of the previous decade: practical teaching, accessible tools, ongoing contact and support that continued after one event finished.

Roland Pomana and others were part of the early connections, with Te Kāhui Manu Hōkai and LINZ contributing to the collaborative environment. Over time the programme developed into regular sessions covering StoryMaps, QGIS, public data, Māori land information, environmental monitoring, mobile collection, LiDAR, three-dimensional visualisation, project planning and later artificial intelligence.

The difference from the conference model was significant. Participants did not need to wait a year for the next event. Learning could happen in smaller pieces. Someone could join for the topic they needed, miss the next session and return later. Support could continue between presentations.

The name Ngā Poutama also became a useful way of thinking about learning. People could be on different steps and still participate in the same wider kaupapa. There was no requirement that everyone become a professional GIS specialist. The useful question was what capability people needed for the mahi in front of them and what the next step might be.

The programme also allowed guest presenters to contribute specific expertise without pretending that one facilitator could be the authority on every subject. That is particularly important in Māori GIS. The technical person can explain mapping. The person with subject expertise can explain the subject. The people with authority over local knowledge remain the authority over that knowledge. Good facilitation is often about getting the right people into the same conversation and knowing when to hand the kōrero over.

The real infrastructure

Looking across this history, the community infrastructure keeps changing. Conferences were followed by mailing lists. Mailing lists sat alongside an association. Workshops led into Indigenous Mapping Wānanga. Online groups supported more immediate discussion. Live webinars demonstrated that practical teaching could happen nationally without travel. Ngā Poutama made ongoing online support part of the normal model.

None of those platforms was permanent, and that is not a failure. The mistake would be to treat the platform as the community. Technology history suggests that today's permanent platform is usually tomorrow's legacy system that nobody remembers the password for.

What endured were the relationships and habits: people shared information, practitioners helped one another, iwi and Māori organisations hosted events, government staff found ways to make public data more usable, trainers gave time, international Indigenous mapping practitioners brought experience and local participants brought real problems that forced the training to remain practical.

For me, that is where the strongest Māori influence on this history sits. It is not in using te reo labels for otherwise conventional technology programmes. It is in recognising that capability is relational, that learning can be reciprocal, that manaakitanga affects whether people can participate, that knowledge has lineage and that the purpose of the technology is to support kaupapa rather than become the kaupapa.

The real infrastructure of Māori GIS has therefore never been the server, software or website. It has been people willing to share practical knowledge and help others become more capable while respecting where authority and knowledge sit. The platforms have changed repeatedly. That part has remained remarkably consistent.

For the broader practitioner history, see From DVDs to AI, and for the capability story see After the mapper leaves.