12 posts tagged with "Ngā Poutama Matawhenua"

Local AI has become much more useful in 2026. A normal desktop computer can now run a capable language model, search a collection of PDFs, extract structured information, help write Python or QGIS expressions and keep the working material on the machine. That makes it particularly interesting for Māori GIS, where the question is often not only whether AI can do the work, but where the information goes while it is doing it.

The most useful local workflow is not a private version of ChatGPT that somehow knows everything about Māori GIS. It is more modest and, for research, more useful. Give the system documents you are allowed to work with. Ask it to find candidate information. Keep the original wording and source reference. Have a person review the result. Check any geographic match against an appropriate source. Only then let the reviewed information become GIS data.

That distinction matters. A language model is quite capable of reading a reference to an old kāinga, deciding what modern place it probably means and supplying coordinates that look perfectly respectable. A GIS will then plot those coordinates without showing the slightest concern about whether they were invented. Local AI changes where the mistake was made. It does not make the mistake authoritative.

The practical question is therefore: what can we now run locally, what is genuinely offline, what appears promising for te reo Māori, and where should AI stop before the map begins?

A few years ago the AI part of a GIS workflow was simple enough. Open ChatGPT, type a question, see what comes back. Sometimes it was useful. Sometimes it confidently invented a Python function. At least the administrative overhead was low.

That has changed. A Māori GIS practitioner wanting help with an ordinary piece of work can now face a small set of decisions before the work starts. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot or something more specialised? A fast model or the one that thinks for longer? Ordinary chat, a project, a research mode, a coding agent or a persistent workspace? Is the task worth using a limited premium allowance? Does the system need three source documents or the whole project folder? Can it use the web? Can it run code? Will it remember anything later? Most importantly for Māori GIS, what information are we about to give it, and should that information leave the environment it is already in?

This is starting to look like a professional skill in its own right. Knowing AI no longer means being good at typing questions into one chatbot. It increasingly means knowing how to select and manage several different kinds of machine assistance, give them the right amount of context, use expensive capability where it matters, keep data under appropriate control, and check the result before it quietly becomes part of the GIS.

There is now a small new addition to Māori GIS Mapping: Kupu Matawhenua, a weekday five-letter word game made for the Ngā Poutama Matawhenua community and anyone else who spends too much time thinking about maps, whenua, taiao and GIS.

The idea is deliberately simple. You get six attempts to find a five-letter word. Some answers are familiar GIS terms such as LAYER, POINT or QUERY. Others are kupu Māori connected with the places, relationships, environmental themes and kinds of mahi that regularly appear in Māori GIS. The aim is not to turn te reo Māori into decoration around an English GIS game. The word set includes concepts such as marae, taiao, ingoa, rāhui, urupā, tūnga, pānga, kūrae, mauri and pūaha because they belong naturally in conversations about place and spatial work.

Tākaro ināianei / Play Kupu Matawhenua →

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.

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.

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.

The June 2026 Ngā Poutama Matawhenua wānanga, Kōrero ā-Mahere: 3D StoryMaps for Kaupapa Māori GIS Mapping, focused on bringing maps, photos, data and kōrero together in an accessible digital story.

Open the current LINZ recording/resource link

The session was held on Friday 19 June 2026 and covered practical StoryMaps techniques rather than requiring advanced GIS experience. The more important point, though, is that the technology should follow the kōrero rather than determine it. A 3D scene, fly-through or swipe map is useful when it helps people understand relationships between places, whenua, awa, maunga, change through time or the sequence of a story. It is not automatically better because it is more visually impressive.

The May 2026 Ngā Poutama Matawhenua wānanga, AI Haumaru, AI Motuhake mō te Māori GIS kaupapa, focused on practical uses of artificial intelligence while protecting Māori GIS data and maintaining control over sensitive information.

The recording and related material are collected on the Ngā Poutama Matawhenua resources page, where the current links can be maintained in one place.

The session was held on Friday 22 May 2026 as an extended online wānanga. The framing matters. AI haumaru is not only a cyber-security question, and AI motuhake is not simply a technical setting. For Māori GIS, the deeper issue is whether people retain practical authority over what information is supplied, what the system is allowed to do with it, how outputs are checked and whether the technology strengthens or weakens rangatiratanga over the mahi.