11 posts tagged with "Governance"

AI governance often ends with a rating such as low, medium or high risk. Those labels can be useful, but only after somebody understands what the system actually does. Rating “AI” in the abstract is much less useful than examining the information, the architecture, the authority and the consequence of a particular use.

A more practical Māori AI assessment can begin with four dimensions. They do not replace tikanga, organisational policy or legal obligations. They help make the technical system visible enough for those things to be applied proportionately.

GIS people are naturally rewarded for adding information. Another layer appears, another dataset is joined, another set of points is mapped and the system becomes richer. That is usually presented as progress. Māori GIS taught me that a good map is sometimes defined just as much by what it deliberately leaves out.

That is not the same as hiding an error or producing an incomplete map through carelessness. It is a decision about kaupapa, authority and responsibility. Some information is too sensitive for a public map. Some locations should be generalised. Some details belong in an internal system rather than a website. Some knowledge may not need to become digital at all. The fact that GIS can map something does not mean it should.

A good GIS workshop can make everything look easy. The trainer has the right software, the example data is clean, the projector works and somebody has already solved every problem the participants are about to encounter. For a few hours the whole thing feels manageable. Then Monday morning arrives and the participant opens their own computer to discover a different version of the software, messy data, missing permissions, six spellings of the same place and an organisation already asking when the finished map will be ready.

That gap between a successful workshop and useful capability has shaped a great deal of the Māori GIS work I have been involved with. Over time it also changed how I thought about what a wānanga was for. The aim was not simply to transfer a set of technical instructions from the expert to the participant. It was to create enough understanding, confidence and connection that people could carry the mahi forward themselves.

The 2017 Indigenous Mapping Wānanga at Claudelands in Hamilton was built around modern mapping tools, practical training and a large collaborative programme. It also provided a very effective demonstration of something much less glamorous: the cloud only works if you can actually reach it. A large room full of participants and trainers opened web mapping applications, imagery and online services at roughly the same time. The venue Wi-Fi struggled, connections slowed and trainers began improvising.

It was frustrating at the time, but it remains one of the better lessons I have taken from years of GIS capability work. The problem was not simply technical. It exposed the difference between a technology being theoretically available and people having a realistic, reliable way to use it for their own kaupapa.

There was a period in Māori GIS when one of our answers to the problem of access was a box containing ten DVDs. At the time this did not seem particularly ridiculous. It seemed innovative. Professional GIS software was expensive, the data was large, internet connections were limited and many of the people who needed access to claimant mapping did not have a full GIS environment sitting on their desk. We wanted people to be able to explore more than a few finished maps, so we developed resource packages using ArcReader and prepared GIS content that could be distributed physically.

At one point the complete package occupied ten discs. The digital future therefore arrived in a cardboard box. What interests me now is not only how old the technology looks, but what problem we were actually trying to solve. The aim was to move more mapping capability closer to the people whose whenua, histories and claims were being represented, rather than leaving the useful GIS locked inside specialist offices.

One sentence eventually became one of the clearest principles in Ngā Poutama Matawhenua: we will never ask you for your data. It sounds like a small operational rule for a training programme. In reality it contains much of what twenty years of Māori GIS work taught me about authority, trust, rangatiratanga and the limits of technical access.

GIS people are trained to acquire data. We search for layers, download services, request files, convert formats and build databases. The professional instinct is often that more information is better. In many ordinary projects that instinct is useful. In Māori GIS it can become dangerous if the technical desire to collect information gets ahead of the questions that should come first: whose information is this, what relationships does it sit within, who has authority over it, why is it being collected and what responsibilities come with holding it?

I am not Māori and do not claim to define tikanga for other people's information. What I can describe is the change in my own practice after years of working with claimant information, iwi and hapū projects, Māori GIS practitioners and training programmes. The more I learnt, the less comfortable I became with the ordinary technology assumption that the person who possesses the file is therefore entitled to organise, copy, analyse and publish it. Technical custody and legitimate authority are not the same thing.

That distinction sits close to rangatiratanga. In a GIS context, I have come to think about it practically: who can decide what is collected, who can see it, where it lives, what leaves the organisation and whether a map should be made public at all? A platform can give people access while quietly shifting those decisions elsewhere. A community can be invited into a modern digital system while losing control over where the information goes. The interface may look empowering while the architecture does the opposite.

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.

For a long time I thought the obvious measure of a GIS project was the thing it produced. A map was finished, a map book was printed, a database was delivered and a set of layers worked. Outputs are comforting because they can be counted, photographed and put into reports. Māori GIS work gradually taught me to ask a much less comfortable question: what happens after the mapper leaves?

That question changed almost everything. A map can be excellent and still leave the people who need it dependent on the person who made it. A GIS can be technically sophisticated and still become useless when the one person who understands the folders moves on. A training event can be inspiring and still achieve almost nothing if the participant returns home and cannot reproduce what they saw. The real test of capability is not whether the system works while the expert is standing beside it. It is whether the work can continue afterwards, under the authority of the people who need it and in a form that can be carried forward.

Over time I came to see that this was more than a sustainability problem in the usual project-management sense. In Māori settings there was often an intergenerational dimension to the work. Whenua, place names, histories and community information were not temporary project assets. People might be using them for a Treaty claim today, environmental planning tomorrow and something quite different in ten or twenty years. The question was therefore not only whether the system survived the funding period, but whether knowledge, context and authority could survive changes in staff, software and organisations.

I am not Māori and do not claim a Māori worldview as my own. What I can describe is what working alongside Māori practitioners and communities taught me about capability. The strongest projects were not simply those that delivered technology. They were the ones that increased rangatiratanga over the work, reduced avoidable dependence and left people better able to make their own decisions about their information.

GIS has a habit of making uncertainty look tidy. Put an old plan on a screen, add a modern cadastral layer, draw a line and label it, and suddenly the result looks as though somebody has settled the matter. The line is crisp, the coordinates are precise, the parcel beneath it is authoritative and the aerial image may be sharp enough to see fences and buildings. Everything about the screen tells the viewer that the answer has been found.

A great deal of Māori claimant mapping taught me the opposite. Sometimes the most accurate result is to admit that the answer is not known. Historical land blocks do not always line up cleanly with modern parcels. Rivers move. Surveyors make assumptions. Names change. Plans disagree. Natural features disappear. Areas recorded on paper do not always agree with areas calculated from geometry. Some source plans are missing altogether. The software is always willing to draw a line, but that does not mean the evidence is willing to support one.

In one of the Northland mapping methodologies we had a very useful description for this: State of Unknown. It was not grand terminology. It simply meant that the available information did not justify pretending there was one certain answer. Over time I came to think of it as one of the most useful professional disciplines GIS can offer, particularly in Māori GIS, where whenua is not merely a parcel to be measured and knowledge of place does not become more authoritative simply because it has been converted into coordinates.

I am not Māori and I do not claim to speak from within te ao Māori. What I can describe is what repeated work alongside Māori claimants, practitioners, researchers and communities taught me about the limits of a purely technical way of looking at land and information. GIS tends to begin with objects: points, lines, polygons, parcels and layers. Much of the Māori mapping work I encountered began somewhere more relational, with people, whenua, whakapapa, history, responsibility and the authority to say what a place means. The map could help represent parts of those relationships, but it could never become the relationship itself.

One of the first things GIS teaches you is confidence. A line appears on the screen cleanly, precisely and apparently without argument. You can zoom into it, measure it, colour it, calculate its area and print it at A0. Once information has travelled through a computer, it acquires a peculiar authority. It looks as though somebody, somewhere, must know exactly where it is and exactly what it means. One of the first things Māori claimant mapping taught me was almost the opposite. Historical land blocks did not always line up neatly with the modern cadastre. Old plans could disagree with one another. Rivers moved. Survey descriptions depended on natural features that had changed or disappeared. Names varied between sources. Areas written on historical records did not always agree with areas calculated by modern GIS. Sometimes a plan was missing altogether, and sometimes two apparently authoritative documents contradicted one another.

In one of the Northland mapping methodologies we had a wonderfully unfashionable description for this: State of Unknown. Rather than forcing the available information to produce an answer simply because the software was capable of drawing one, we recorded that the answer remained unresolved. At the time it was a practical classification for awkward historical geography. Over the next twenty years it became something closer to a professional philosophy. The temptation in GIS is always to resolve, align, categorise and complete. State of Unknown was a reminder that sometimes the more professional thing is to preserve the uncertainty.

What changed more slowly for me was the way I thought about the thing underneath the map. In conventional GIS the land can easily become a surface on which information is located. Parcels sit on it, roads cross it, rivers run through it and points are placed where events occurred. Working alongside Māori claimants, practitioners, researchers, iwi and hapū repeatedly challenged that habit. Whenua was not simply the backdrop to the information. It sat within relationships, whakapapa, occupation, memory, responsibility, history and identity. The map could help represent parts of those relationships, but it could not contain them all.

I am not Māori, and I do not claim to explain te ao Māori or speak for the people whose knowledge shaped the projects I worked on. My part in this history has been much more practical. I have built maps, recovered old plans, configured GIS systems, organised workshops, trained people, supported conferences, found data, developed resources, fixed broken things, produced programmes, dealt with government agencies and occasionally discovered that an ambitious twenty-first-century mapping project was being held together by a cardboard box of DVDs and somebody remembering where the extension lead had gone. What changed my practice was being in rooms where somebody else understood the place, history or meaning far better than I did and learning that the technical role was most useful when it supported that authority rather than competing with it.