I whakaputahia tuatahia tēnei atikara e RNZ
A new decentralised data storage network will put Māori data in Māori hands with the goal of ensuring Māori sovereignty doesn’t “stop at the server door”.
Designed by Te Kāhui Raraunga, Te Pā Tūwatawata will be available to marae, hapū, iwi or other organisations who wish to store their data within the protection of the Pā.
Principal advisor Erena Mikaere said it was a commercial storage service designed specifically to meet the needs of iwi Māori, hapū and marae.
The project was built on open source technology and led by Māori scientists, Māori engineers and grounded in tikanga Māori, she said.
“Central to everything from its architecture, to its initial conceptions, to the values that drive it, and then also to our customer service delivery, it’s really about doing things in a very Māori way, based on a Te Ao Māori worldview. And so to that end, we didn’t just want to offer like an automated store with us and push this button and register your name and company and here’s the invoice type of style. It starts with a conversation, it starts with a kōrero, like all good things. And so that means that we can provide them with a really tailored service.”
Te Pā Tūwatawata provides end-to-end encryption of data, both in transit and at rest, which Mikaere said would mean only the group that submitted the data to the platform would have the “keys” required to decrypt it.
“What it does is it provides a safe place for some of our data that we might consider, or that whānau and hapū, iwi might consider, are some of our most sensitive sets of mātauranga. It provides a way in which we can protect that and ensure extra restriction, say over another data set, which perhaps isn’t as sensitive.”
Mikaere said there had already been inquiries from iwi keen to advance their archiving aspirations.
“Much of our data, you know, if we think about some of our audio files and video files from back in the day, are held by others. And this is an opportunity for iwi to be that one true source of their information.”
A significant step towards data sovereignty
Mikaere said the launch of Te Pātūwatawata was a significant step towards data sovereignty. A nation without control of its digital infrastructure was a nation whose sovereignty “stops at the server door”, she said.
“For us and all indigenous peoples, really globally, sovereign digital systems aren’t and shouldn’t be a technical preference. They are a precondition for self-determination, for rangatiratanga.”
Of all the layers within a digital ecosystem, storage was the most foundational; it determined who held the data and who could access it. Without it, every app, platform, or AI model, especially AI models trained on indigenous knowledge, remains vulnerable to foreign jurisdiction and to corporate interests, she said.
“There’s a track record of others treating our data as a resource to extract, not to steward and not to protect, but to extract. You know, the same way that land was extracted, and the same way that language was extracted, and in the same way that children were even extracted from the arms of their whānau and placed into systems that were never built for them. So the pattern of that isn’t new, the medium is. Te Pātuwatawata provides a solution to stop that.”
Mikaere said it was already occurring, with large AI models giving answers in te reo Māori, or answers about things in Te Ao Māori, which were not necessarily true.
“One of the other significant solutions that we must ensure is having Māori governance over the data. Because... I’m not sure if everybody truly understands that AI is built on data. So without data governance, there is no AI governance. Without data infrastructure, there is no AI infrastructure. So if we can get data infrastructure and data governance right first, then that goes a long way to ensuring safe and ethical AI.”
Te Kāhui Raraunga had produced a Māori Data Governance Model and, more recently, a Māori AI Governance Framework, which Mikaere said provided great blueprints for how to ensure safety as things continued to change.
“The pace that people are trying to build AI that is not for us, that is not cognisant of the environment either, is really scary. And so the faster that we can become more aware and the faster that we can have and buy into solutions like this, which really are about protection and more than that, and they’re about leveraging off of the opportunity and the potential that AI brings, because it does, but only in the right hands and only with the right leadership and governance behind it.”
Nā Pokere Paewai nō RNZ
