AMY: Hi. Welcome to Episode 143 of Greater Than Code. I'm Amy Newell and my co-host Rein Henrichs will take it from here.

REIN: Hello, everyone. I'm Rein and I'm going to introduce our guest, Keoni Mahelona. Did I get that at all right?

KEONI: That’s pretty close. 

REIN: Pretty close. I'll take it, okay. So, Keoni is a Native Hawiian born and raised on the island of Kaua'i where Mark Zuckerburg forced the sale of ancestral land. He went to Olin College of Engineering, worked on driverless cars back in the DARPA urban challenge days with MIT, went to New Zealand on a Fulbright and met his partner of nearly 10 years. He is Maori. Over the past 10 years, he has been working for an indigenous media organization and applying his technical background to an industry ripe for disruption. 

So, this is what I think is really cool. Well, a lot of it is really cool but especially this. Recently, they’ve built the first te reo Maori speech recognition and speech synthesis engine. The tech exists for this - so the key challenge for them was acquiring and managing the data with indigenous intelligence. I'm going to start by asking you the question we always ask and maybe we can talk a little bit about how that happened. So, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

KEONI: I guess one thing I'm good at is I can build things pretty quickly. I just take ideas and I guess rapid prototype, if you will. And I think that’s been the key for our organization in the last four years in terms of trying out new ideas and adapting. We're a very small organization and we don’t have much money, so being able to test things quickly before investing a lot in it is really important for us. 

REIN: You were born in Hawaii and your Maori and so then you went to New Zealand?

KEONI: No, no. Let me. So, I'm Hawaiian on a lot of things, as a lot of us are. I'm predominantly identified as Hawaiian but I'm also Chinese and Native American and Irish and French, and probably a few other things that I'm unaware of. I went to school in the East Coast, got a [inaudible], went to New Zealand where I met my partner	in New Zealand a year after that [inaudible] and that’s why I'm still in New Zealand. But New Zealand is actually a pretty amazing country and a great place to live especially considering some of the things happening in America right now. My partner is a Maori, so that’s the indigenous people of New Zealand where The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings was filmed. And there's actually like an indigenous group of people who lived here who were colonized by the British back in the day. So yes, my partner and I have a lot of similarities or shared values. We have a lot of shared values and I think that’s why we've been able to work, we actually like work together. He's the General Manager and I'm sort of the tech person. And when people hear about this, they're like, "Oh wow, you are really a partner." That’s pretty good because sometimes that can lead to a lot of conflict and it does sometimes lead to conflict but at the end of the day, we have shared values and I think that’s what enabled us to do the sort of work that we're doing which is pioneering revitalization of te reo Maori and Maori culture with the help of technology. And now, being a Hawaiian, I have this kuleana, this responsibility to actually go back to where I'm from and help our people there. And so now, through this work with machine learning and indigenous data, I'm sort of being pulled back to Hawaii and trying to see how we can work more with the Hawaiians and some of their issues. 

REIN: Yeah, so I just read that wrong. You're Hawaiian and your partner is Maori. 

KEONI: Yes, that’s right. [Chuckles]

REIN: I guess you both have a connection to your respective indigenous cultures. 

KEONI: Absolutely. Totally. If anything, my partner's more grounded in his culture than I am because I've had a very strong Western education. Like with TMT, we're talking about building an advanced telescope on top of a sacred mountain. I can geek out about the coolness of the technology in this telescope and what it can enable us to do. But I need someone like my partner or the kupuna, our elders back in Hawaii, to ground me and be like, "Yeah, okay. There are these sort of western benefits to the project but these are the culture ramifications of it." So yeah, he very much helps ground me in terms of reminding me of my kuleana or the culture aspects of what we have to do. 

AMY: I'm sure that’s a really important piece for all of us working in tech that is so easy to forget, that tech is also about people and we really need to consider exactly that, those ramifications and how to negotiate that where a project may get something really great from a technology standpoint but not be so great for the people who it's directly affecting. What are some ways you try to sort through that in your community?

KEONI: For us, because of our organization and how we're structured, we're non-profit charity. We have a board that is made up of two members from each of five tribes that we represent in the far north of New Zealand.  But we have a bit of autonomy in terms of how we operate. But in terms of accountability, we're not accountable to shareholders. We're actually accountable to our community. And our community are the people we see on the street every day. And so, if we do the wrong thing, our community will let us know about it whether it's messages on Facebook or calling us out on the street. We're accountable to the people that we represent that helps remind us to do the right thing, if you will. But sometimes, we're in this situation where we're not sure what the right thing is because this is a new area. And so, one example is with this corpus that we've to do modern speech recognition. Like that data could give any machine the ability to machine read the culture at scale. And so it can learn all about us, it can learn our traditional knowledge and our te reo Maori. One example is with the Manuka honey, Maori always used Manuka which is like a tea tree, related to the Australian tea tree. Maori always used it as a traditional medicine. And then there was a scientist at the university who sort of took that idea and then tried to understand what in Manuka allowed it to have some medicinal effects. And he sort of isolated some particular molecule that comes out of the Manuka honey and you can maintain the integrity of that molecule if you process the honey a certain way, et cetera, et cetera. So, you have this huge booming Manuka honey industry. So big in fact that people are trying to fake Manuka honey and now we're having to do DNA test to ensure the integrity of the honey. 

So that's an example where a little bit of indigenous knowledge led to quite a large economy or a large product. Likewise, if machines can just sort of read our culture at scale, they could pull out these sorts of information. Because of the state of many indigenous people through colonization, there is a lot of knowledge that might have been captured whether it was doing radio interviews 30 years ago or writing down notes in a book. There is some of this data there but we don’t know it's there. We know where it might be but we don’t know what's in those books that are collecting dusts in a museum somewhere. So, actually teaching machines all languages could us to revitalize our culture and bring back some of our traditional knowledge that’s just sitting there. And it'll help us do this at scale but it's important that we ensure that we are the ones doing it because that’s our data and they’ve already taken our land. And we're not going to allow them to take our data and capitalize it and make a profit off of it while our people are still in poverty, have high rates of heart disease and rheumatic fever, and all these other things we're struggling. And this is really the final frontier of colonization. And so, that’s a huge responsibility for us is to possess a corpus that can enable this. And so sometimes, I'm like, "Geez, is our security…" You're hearing about security breaches. [Crosstalk]

REIN: The data that these projects have generated, you want to make sure that you have ownership of it. 

KEONI: Not ownership. 

REIN: Not you specifically, but the culture from which it arises. 

KEONI: The community that contributed the data in our minds sort of own that data. We are just the guardians of that which we're calling the kaitiaki. The similar word in Hawaii, you might have heard with TMT movement, they're saying ku kiai mauna. Ku is standing, kiai is protector, guardian. So tiaki and kiai, basically the same word with some sound variation there, but the same word and same meaning in Hawaiian and in Maori. So, we're the guardians of these data. We don’t own it. We just look after it and ensure that the right things are done with the data. And we've said that we need these data to help with language revitalization or to create technology that will allow Maori to build the next generation of apps that have a speech interface. And so, our community are very much aware of the intention of us collecting these data and what we're trying to do with it. But they also trust us because our organization, I've only been there for about four years, but our organization has been around since 1991. It's a community organization. So in the last 27 odd years, we've built trust in the community. So when we say, "Hey, we need this data to do this thing," they trust that we will do the right thing with the data. As opposed to, say, Google came along and say, "Hey, we need this indigenous thing," clearly there's not much trust in an organization like that. So we do have an advantage in that regard. Obviously, we don’t have sort of the financial resources.

REIN: And at the same time, it seems like if you could share the data in a way that protects sort of the rights that people have to it, then that could be useful. Isn't that where this license comes in?

KEONI: Yeah, that’s right. And so, with language revitalization and these sort of digital technologies, if we want these indigenous languages to stay around, they will need a place in the digital world which means that, it's hard to say but I think Siri might have to speak Maori and Hawaiian at some point. Same with Cortana and Alexa and whatever Google's one is called, I think it has a name. That’s a decision that’s going to have to be made per indigenous group. And the thing is I think we would be okay with that. For example with Apple, they don’t sell language as a service, sort of. They just have -- it's hard to explain the other one. Google and Microsoft and Amazon, they sell language as a service. You can record some audio, send it to their Cloud platforms and get back some text. You can even get back how old the person is or whether they're male or female, et cetera, et cetera. Anyone in the world can spin up some Google or Amazon service and now build some sort of language application with the languages that those companies support. So if we gave them Maori or Hawaiian, they could then sell those languages as a service to anyone in the world. And for us, that’s a problem because that’s a missed economic opportunity for us. Whilst it's not a lot of money for Google because of the [inaudible] which they operate, for our people, we're a minority, most of our people are in poverty, that is an economic opportunity that could help a lot of families. And it’s also high value jobs that we could create for our own people. And so that’s why we're very much against anyone but ourselves selling our language as a service. And that becomes troublesome because with Google, [inaudible] all of their services use all of their cloud API. You can't just have, say, Google's Pixel speak Maori without them being able to offer that to the millions of developers that use their platform, at least not now. It would be a special case. And they probably don’t want to handle multitudes of special cases of a bunch of minority languages. 

Apple, on the other hand, doesn’t really have a Cloud platform you can use. And so, we might be a little more comfortable with Siri learning Maori because it wouldn’t just mean that anyone who has a phone could just speak Maori to it without being so concerned about whether non-Maori could develop Maori-learning apps, for example, and sell it back to us. It's something that we need to think about more and there's a few of us who are very much aware of this situation. We're not sure what the right [inaudible] is but we're very much sure that we need to maintain the sovereignty over these data. And we need to be the ones to decide how it's being used. 

AMY: That sounds like a very challenging catch-22 because of course, for the maintenance of the language, you want it to be sort of available on people's phones and in everybody's little home devices. And yeah, it also makes perfect sense that you need to retain it, not give it away to Google. Wow, that had never occurred to me. This is not quite the same thing but I was having a conversation about Yiddish last night with a colleague who teaches Yiddish. People learn Yiddish essentially to maintain the culture and to learn about their cultural heritage. There are some small Jewish communities where it's still a first language, but there's a much larger set of people who are just interested in it for general sort of Ashkenazi Jewish culture. Is there a larger community of people who don’t speak Maori but are kind of interested in it from that cultural background perspective?

KEONI: Yeah. Maori is -- I'm trying to think of some colloquialism to use but I'm very bad at them anyway. What's the song from The Wiz? This year's bike is next year's tank or something like that? Anyway, Maori is hot right now. It is in. Everybody wants to learn Maori, whether they're Maori or not. You have a lot of non-Maori learning Maori and being praised for this, but it's interesting because most Maori don't have large amounts of disposable income because of just the years of injustice and racism. And so, the privileged community are more able to take some time out of their day and pay some money to go and learn the language whereas the indigenous people who actually come from that language are more concerned about how they're going to feed their kids tomorrow. And so, that’s an interesting socio-economic thing happening. But despite that, Maori is becoming popular, more people are wanting to learn Maori in this country. Even immigrants coming to New Zealand are wanting to learn Maori. The government is making it a goal to have maybe a million people speaking Maori, having some basic understanding of Maori by 2040. So even the government is pushing to bring New Zealand to become a bilingual country but to really bring Maori into the mainstream, and that's what we're seeing in New Zealand. I think that’s part of this language revitalization journey that [inaudible] Maori is finally at the state where -- the academics might say it's still at risk but when you see it being used in the communities and how it's being used certainly for us, I just think the language is doing good. I just can see it doing better over time. 

In Hawaii, they're probably a decade or so behind Maori in terms of the language revitalization. And I haven’t spent enough time there to get that community [inaudible] before, but I just got back from being on the Mauna Kea. And being there, there's so much Hawaiian spoken. Even the kids who are helping volunteering to serve food during the day, they're just having conversations with each other in Olelo Hawai'i. And then we’re down in Hilo, the receptionists at hotels are speaking Olelo Hawai'I and you just see it more in that community. And to me, that's such a great sign that the language is strong and there is a good movement to bring it back. But I'm not sure how much of the non sort of Hawaiian population are wanting to learn Hawaiian. I think globally, indigenous languages are becoming popular, if you will. There is a company called Lion Bridge. They sell localization as a service which means if you have a brand or a marketing campaign and you want to take it to another country, they will help you to sort of translate it and everything to make sure it's culturally appropriate. They’ve been actively soliciting speakers of indigenous languages to sell their language for something like $45 an hour. They were trying to get Hawaiians and Maori and Samoans to go to some website of theirs and read sentences of those other languages and then record these. So they can do speech recognition. And they have this rhetoric about helping minority languages, blah, blah, blah. But at the end of the day, Lion Bridge is an American corporate. They don’t have any presence in our communities. And so to me, that’s a sign that there's clearly an economic opportunity here when you have a global corporate investing in acquiring indigenous languages. Clearly, someone sees that there's an economic opportunity here and we need to ensure that the indigenous people are the ones who sees that opportunity. Other than that, it's back to where we were in terms of Wild West and the Pacific where it's first come, first served and then we're left with nothing. 

REIN: When I was getting ready for this episode, I really want to sort of learn more about the underlying issues. And so, I started doing some reading. And I found a paper in the International Indigenous Policy Journal called Data as a Strategic Resource: Self-Determination, Governance, and the Data Challenge for the Indigenous Nations in the United States. And this idea that data is a strategic resource for these communities is really interesting to me. There's a book that I found called Indigenous Data Sovereignty that was published by the Australian National University. They're Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. And there's a chapter in that book about Maori healthcare data and how it's being collected, how it’s being used, who has the rights to that data. What I realize is that what you're doing is actually part of a much larger picture and a much larger on-going issue for indigenous people all over the world in regards to the rights they have to the data that’s collected by and about them. 

KEONI: It's important to remember that this applies to everybody, indigenous or not. I guess indigenous at some point in time. What we're talking about in terms of data sovereignty, it's universal. What often happens is that the minorities who can be exploited the easiest, if you will. But there's a group in New Zealand called [timon ararauna]. I think they're predominantly made up of academics and they’ve been looking at this for much longer than we have. They’ve developed like a 2-page sort of on Maori data sovereignty but I think it actually applies universally. And there's some ideas in there that are really interesting. One is [fenona tanga] and the way that I see that is if you belong to a minority group, the data that you, as an individual, might have can relate very well to some of the other people in your group. And if you decide to give your data away to someone, that could affect others in your group because of the fact that you're from minority. And that’s sort of [fenoni tanga] is remembering that the decisions you make as an individual around your data might actually affect other people. Just that thinking is important and I think that applies universally whether you're indigenous or not, that the decisions that society is making as individuals in terms of the data they're giving away can affect other people in society. And I think we really need to bring that little forefront of our thinking to know that we're not just looking after ourselves, we're looking after others in terms of making smart decisions around what we do with our data. 

And so, the example there is genetic testing. Because Polynesians are quite genetically similar especially with the Hawaiians and Maori. We're very, very genetically similar. If one of us decides, "Ah yeah, I'm happy to go and get a DNA test." And then Ancestry.com or 23andMe decide, "Oh yeah, they're going to use our DNA," and sell it some pharmaceuticals so they can do some research and make some money off of it, there's other people in our group that’s affected by that because of our genetic similarity. And so this thinking around indigenous data sovereignty and infusing it as -- what was the word you used? Strategic thing? I guess it's strategic and that maybe it gives us some collateral against the colonizers. I don’t know. Maybe it's all that we have left and we should safeguard it. Or I think what we're finding with climate change, a lot of indigenous ways of working with the environment were sustainable. For example, how we did fish farms in Hawaii allowed us to have quite a large population without a judgmental effect on the environment. And so it's indigenous knowledge like that that I think can help communities and economies find sustainable solutions that work for the environment and with the environment and for the people and with the people. And in that regard, perhaps that’s what these publications are alluding to is that we actually do have traditional knowledge that for a while has been marginalized. You have this sort of western pale, stale male scientists in the 1800's. And even before coming to the indigenous communities basically saying we're just these hedonistic barbarians and we don’t know anything, and we sailed to Hawaii by floating on a raft in the currents. And then of course fast forward to now, we have publications and your canonical scientific journals basically confirming what indigenous people have already known and there are few really good examples of that which I think again reaffirms what maybe they're saying in these publications that there's a lot of knowledge there that can actually not just help our people but actually help society. And again, that takes us back to this machine learning and revitalizing our culture at scale and that there's probably some data there amongst indigenous people throughout the world that can be quite important for society as we do with these global problems around climate change and data privacy and all those things. 

REIN: There's society that the knowledge that’s being collected doesn’t represent the needs and priorities of these communities, instead represents the needs and priorities of the corporations they're effectively trying to exploit that knowledge. 

KEONI: What we're finding is that a lot of these, when you do your drug trials, your sample, predominantly western people, a lot of pharmaceuticals develop in America, so they're testing their drugs on a predominantly white population or European sort of population. And then you take those drugs and you put on a Pacific community or an African community, they don’t work as well. And in fact, they might work differently because we're genetically different. I think that’s one of the new things that we're finding in terms of health and data. And I know there's a few Maori groups in this country who are looking at collecting this data on Maori so that they can develop drugs that are more effective for Maori and the Pacifica. But again, like you said, I think often there's a corporate partner who aren’t held accountable by the community from which the data comes. They're held accountable by shareholders who just need to ensure return on their investment. 

AMY: I feel like this is a huge problem across sort of health data drug with just making sure that corporations have some kind of incentive to actually be showing safety and efficacy across many populations. That incentive just, as you said, it's not there. Also going back thinking about the honey example that you used earlier. It sounds like that is benefitting the community. But there's always this question of how do you stop someone from finding a molecule that’s a little bit not, similar enough that it still works, but it's different enough that it can be patented, and then going off and kind of that money not flowing back into the community. 

KEONI: With the honey I think what the patent is on is the process and yet like you said, everyone even Maori are benefitting from the Manuka economy. That's a good example of it working well. In New Zealand, we've got the treaty Waitangi which enables Maori to take a claim to the government for past injustices and contemporary injustices. And so I think that has enabled some of these things to work out well. But even so, right now there's the protest in [inaudible] and there's one in New Zealand for Ihumatao, a tribe from Auckland region. And a lot of their land, for example, the Auckland airport sits on their land and they're fighting. There's some good things coming out in New Zealand but we still have a lot ways to go in terms of sovereignty or fixing past injustices. 

AMY: And yet it thus seem, speaking obviously as an outside observer, that treaty was very important and that New Zealand has done a lot better job than a lot of other countries on kind of coming to terms with its history. I don’t know that I have an articulate…

KEONI: No, I think that’s a consistent outside perspective. One thing we have to remember to do is not to say, "Oh, the Maoris have it better than the Hawaiians." That’s not what it's about. But me, coming from Hawaii and to [inaudible], I can say it's better. But the treaty has enabled a lot for Maori. For example, I'm not sure we could have done this machine learning work around with speech assistance and speech processing in Hawaii because I don’t know where the money would have come from, short of a corporate. Whereas in New Zealand, the treaty, for example, we got funding from the government from a claim on the 4G spectrum [inaudible] threshold broadcast television use to operate on and then they sort of took that away and sold off that spectrum real estate to telecoms so they could provide 4G LTE. And so, Maori put in a claim for that and whilst the spectrum was sold off for hundreds of millions of dollars by the government to basically two or three telecom companies, Maori got 30 million dollars from that. And that 30 million dollars was specifically set aside for ICT funding. So, the idea is that the funding would be used to increase the capability and capacity for Maori to operate or exist in ICT. So whether that means training for young Maori to get a STEM degree or helping Maori businesses to do R&D so that they can be more into ICT as opposed to traditional businesses. Or in our case, supporting developing a technology that would enable more Maori to build ICT-related applications. So the treaty has enabled a lot of these things, whereas in Hawaii, technically by international law, Hawaii is in America. America is in Hawaii. The United States is still occupying the kingdom of Hawaii or the Hawaiian nation. That’s a fact. That’s the fact as deemed by international law and even in the UN. I think the problem is no one can enforce that because America is still the most powerful nation in the world, although China is quickly catching up. And so, I think Maori has pioneered a lot of revitalization efforts. But all of the indigenous communities throughout the world have done great things and we've shared a lot of that with each other. Hawaiians signed the Punana Leo through the Kohanga Reo movement in [inaudible] which I think got some ideas from the Gaelic communities in Ireland. And so, we're definitely sharing the knowledge and some of us might have easier dealing with our governments than others but it is important that we don’t say one indigenous community has it better than the other. Instead we sort of think how do we support each other so we can all achieve what we're trying to achieve to our people.

AMY: Can I ask more about the United States occupying The Kingdom of Hawaii part of that? Can you go into that more?

KEONI: I'm very much not an expert on that. I can tell you a little bit of history on that. I literally learned this in high school and that was awhile ago. What it comes down to is Hawaii was very much a sovereign nation. It was The Kingdom of Hawaii historically because we did have a king who united all the main islands of Hawaii. But we quickly saw western civilization encroaching on the Pacific and our chiefs at the time knew that if Hawaii wanted a future in this new world, then we need to do some things. And some of those things involved creating this western idea of nationhood. And that meant having a palace, it meant having a flag, having treaties with other countries. So, we did all of that. We had treaties with Japan and France and the UK. Our chiefs at the time or our leaders at the time did everything that they should have done to have a nation. So, we very much had a vibrant active nation. Anyone could be a Hawaiian national. A citizen of Hawaii didn’t just have to an indigenous Hawaiian. Anyone could be a Hawaiian national. And so, while we started with the kingdom, we eventually had a constitution -- I can't remember the details but I think we had what you would call a constitutional monarchy at one stage where we had a queen but we still had elected officials and people would vote. So, we were slowly becoming more of a democracy towards the late 1800's. 

And then 1893, the way it goes is there were five business interests. These were people like Dole, who were the owners of plantations. What the scholars say is that their motivation was they wanted to remove tariffs between trade between Hawaii and America. And one path they saw for that was to make Hawaii a territory of the United States. So, this group of five businessmen with the illegal assistance of the United States military, the USS Boston was stationed in Pearl Harbor in 1893 because of the Spanish-American war. So, they got the captain of the USS Boston to get his troops and march them to Iolani Palace, our palace, and hold our queen, Queen Lili?uokalani to gunpoint and basically [inaudible] a coup and took our nation over with that. Our queen did not want any fighting or bloodshed because that’s the sort of person she was. And her thinking was she's not going to have any violence and she's going to take this to the President of the United States and do the just thing to resolve the situation. At the time, Grover Cleveland was President. He got word of what had happened. He sent someone to investigate this coup in America. I forget the guy's name. And he basically concluded that there was an illegal overthrow of our nation, but with the assistance of the United States military. But Grover Cleveland was, at that time the election was up, so he wasn’t reelected. Roosevelt was elected as the next president. He had a different way of leading and I think he saw Hawaii as a strategic military place. And so, he wasn’t keen on restoring the sovereignty to the people in Hawaii. Eventually, I think it's 1897 or so, we became a territory of the United States. That's kind of the gist of it. And then even later, as a slap in the face, in 1959 when Hawaii became a "state", the thing with territories and statehood is what's meant to happen is -- I think you're supposed to have three questions on the ballot. One is go back to being a sovereign nation, two is remain a territory, or three is become a state. So, those are the three questions you meant to get. And only the citizens of the occupied nation are supposed to vote. So, only Hawaiian nationals should have been able to vote one of those three questions. But instead, anyone residing in Hawaii at the time who were predominantly American citizens were allowed to vote on whether Hawaii should become a state. And I think there were only two questions and that was remain a territory or become a state. So, even Hawaii becoming a state wasn't just or legal in that regard. So, that's like trying to remember from high school and hearing about it over and over throughout the years in recollection of the history of America's occupation in Hawaii. So technically, America still has this presence in a nation which technically still exists. 

AMY: Thank you. I so appreciate this. I know you said you didn’t remember a lot, but that seemed like a very thorough accounting. Thank you. 

REIN: If I remember it correctly, the US made something like four treaties in Hawaii in the 19th century and then broke all of them.

KEONI: [Chuckles] Yeah, I think that's right because surely with tariffs there were treaties. And then they know we had some trade tariffs with American with sugar plantations. 

REIN: I'm really interested in this license and how you created a license to protect data sovereignty. What it does is different from other licenses. 

KEONI: [inaudible] this thing called the Kaitiakitanga-License. Kaitiaki is guardian/protector. I don’t totally understand Maori languages but the tongue maybe personifies it or something or makes it a noun or something. So Kaitiakitanga-License. Putting that aside, how we operate as an organization and because of my partner who's the general manager, he very much knows the customs of this people. And he brings that into how he runs our organization. So, our actions are guided by tikanga which is the Maori word for custom. So we do things the Maori way. And so, just by nature of how we operate on a day-to-day basis, we sort of brought that into what we do with data and that is apply tikanga, apply our cultural customs into the process in which we deal with data. And so, what that means is for example, we like to have a face to face conversation with people before we give them access to things and [inaudible] that might not scale in the digital realm, but that’s how we operate. And so that’s one thing that is important for us in terms of this license is that if somebody wants access to this data or this IP, we need to have some sort of a relationship building thing at first whether that is a face to face conversation like in person or via video. And that’s just for us to get a feel of the other people and seeing if their intentions are genuine and that they want to do the right thing with this data. 

The other part of it is ensuring that the data or the IP is used for the benefit of X. And you can define what X is. In this case with what we're doing, that is for the benefit of Maori. It is for the revitalization and the promotion and the preservation of te reo Maori and [inaudible] Maori, of everything Maori. And that’s what we want to see. We also want to see a commitment to create jobs for Maori in the tech sector. We actually have high value jobs so we can help to move our people out of poverty. So those are some of the values and vision of license. 

We're not sure how we can use this in a legal sense. It’s more of a way of doing business, if you will. But we thing we could turn into a legal thing and because we have the treaty, we might have some president's foreclaims over some of these things. If it's hard to understand, like my equivalent is affirmative action. And so, with our Kaitiakitanga-License, we've got these APIs from Maori speech recognition and speech synthesis, we want Maori to be the first to use these APIs to have the opportunity to create chat bots, whatever you want with this technology. And then if after a certain amount of time they don’t want to, then we will open it up to non-Maori. 

That was best as our thinking two years ago. Fast forward to now, we are being contacted by a number of non-Maori organizations asking us for access to APIs. In some cases quite blatantly asking us for data which we should have expected because there aren’t very many Maori in STEM, so there aren’t very many Maori leading or running tech companies or startups. Predominantly non-Maori in New Zealand who are building speech chat interfaces for government or for businesses. And they all want to be able to support te reo Maori because they are realizing that there is a Maori economy popping up in this country. More people are speaking Maori. Businesses want to be able to support te reo Maori. Again, we're in this sticky situation where we've developed these tools for Maori but there aren’t very many Maori out there who want to use them, but there are a lot of non-Maori out there who want to use them. So now, we need to rethink what do we do about this. Like I said earlier, if there are Maori in that organization or it’s co-led by an organization or that non-Maori organization can show a commitment to support Maori whether it's via jobs, whether it's supporting some of our missions in terms of language revitalization, then we're definitely happy to work with those organizations to provide these speech tools that they might want to use. 

REIN: You're in a position where you are sort of a steward, or I guess you said a guardian for these data, and also sort of a broker or partner with sharing that data responsibly with other parties. It seems like a position with a lot of responsibility for you in terms of extending that trust that you built with these communities. And adding to that, there's a chain of trust from the people you might work with all the way back to the communities. 

KEONI: Yeah, that’s exactly it. Remember that I'm Hawaiian. I'm not Maori. I don’t make these decisions. Maori are the ones who make these decisions. It's important in an organization and the fact that our organization is -- our trustees, they are our elders as well. We have elders on our board. And so, there's a whole group of people who are part of us and help guide us in terms of making these decisions. We don’t know what the right decision is. All we know is we just have to move forward. And so even now, we're asking other Maori leaders who had been in this industry and who are sort of in the same thing like, "What do we do?" We're not sure. And so I think we're trying to convene a meeting or a [inaudible] on this very issue of the fact that we have this tech and we have this data and there are people who want access to it, and we're going to have to make sure we -- like people are going to have to have access to it but we need to make sure we do it in the right way. And you like you said, extending that trust. And that’s why that face to face stuff, it’s like when you're hiring people. There's always stuff on paper, you really need to get to know the person. For us, we're a small organization. There's like 10 of us. Our tech team is like two. And we're bringing contractors now and then to help with writing code and whatever, but it's pretty much me. And we've hired a junior who I've been mentoring over the last six months. And so, if we make the wrong decision in hiring someone, it does a toll in our organization significantly because of how small we are. And I think that’s the same idea when you look at Maori indigenous data is that if you make the wrong decision there, it can have significant impacts on the entire community. It is a big responsibility. 

Another interesting thing is I was asked by a Hawaiian, he asked me what do I identify as? And I was like, "What?" At first I thought he was talking about my sexuality. But he said no, like, "Are you a Hawaiian or are you a Maori?" Because when I go and I speak about the project in the work that we do, I use things like 'we' and 'our' which are inclusive words that suggest that I was Maori. And me using those words makes people think that I'm Maori. But genetically I'm not Maori, but my family are Maori, my partner is a Maori, I am like another son to his mother and his father. And so, I'm very much a part of the family and a part of the community. And the elders in that community have given me the permission to speak on behalf of our organization. That is why I go up and I speak with 'we' and 'our'. I'm a Hawaiian and I have a kuleana, I have a responsibility to Hawaii. And likewise, the same question was asked in New Zealand, like what do I feel being a non-Maori and speaking on Maori data and technology and all these things. Fortunately, half of our organization was there to support me. But I'm very much aware of my role and what I can and can't do. And I'm very much aware that I do not make any decisions on behalf of Maori. I can make decisions on behalf of [inaudible] and on behalf of our organization but I am in a very difficult situation where I need to ensure I don’t do the wrong thing because at the end of the day, I'm the one who's got the AWS credentials to our data and our APIs and all those things. So yeah, it's a big responsibility. 

The fact that I feel that it's an important responsibility, I think, is important and perhaps that’s one thing that we need in tech like people to realize that in their positions and in their roles, they might have a lot more responsibility than they think they do because they're often just stuck in the code. When they think about the greater ramifications of the things they're building and the data that they have, they really need to be aware of how their little decisions can affect a lot of people. Because if not, then you get what you get, with Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, et cetera. 

AMY: I feel like there is so much juicy stuff in all of what you just said. I don’t even know where to start. The nature of responsibility and what you just said about all of us in tech really having a responsibility. Even if you're a junior individual contributor, what we do has impact on other people and on the world. What you said sort of person to person being important for developing trust and the responsibility that that sort of person to person trust entails. And hiring decisions, for example, which I hire a lot. So I think about this a lot [laughs] because you're right. Even in a larger organization, a hire that someone who breaches trust can have such a huge negative impact on the people around them. 

REIN: I think the thing that’s the most striking for me is how this all relates back it seems to a sense of community. That’s something that I don’t have as much of. I have neighbors that I don’t really talk to. I have friends that I see occasionally. But I don’t feel the same sense of connection to a community. I don’t have any elders to be on my board. And I wonder how that sense of community plays into this and how it maybe helps you be more conscious and empathetic towards the needs of the people around you. I don’t know how to build a sense of community in places where it hasn’t sort of arose through culture and family. 

KEONI: That’s a good point. What it is, is some shared cause or some shared vision. Protests for example, protect your rights. If you want a good sense of community, go to Mauna Kea. If you can afford the trip whether you're Hawaiian or not, I give you permission, go to Mauna Kea and just see what a community can be, what a society can be. In 10 days, they’ve created this community that is just full of love. There's nothing negative about it. It's just so supportive and full of love. There's free medical, if you're sick or unwell, you can get access to free medical. You can even get a massage. We call it lomilomi which is a traditional Hawaiian form of massage. I think I saw four lomilomi or massage tables there. There's free food. There's always food and you can always have food, if you're hungry. And there's a university and it doesn’t cost any money. And it is just people, it seemed like an unconference where you just go and decide what the schedule is going to be, et cetera. And so it's this big sort of unconference that’s running every day. There's four tranches with five sessions in each one. And they're doing things like Hawaiian language, learn Hawaiian chants, learn about the multitude of varieties of kalo or taro or that gooey purply stuff you might have seen when you visited Hawaii. 

I ran a course on data sovereignty. My partner ran a course on indigenous media. There are courses on Hawaiian governance, on what we talked about in terms of Hawaiian kingdom and the overthrow. This is all just sort of happen. This community just sort of created itself and naturally grew and organized over time. And that is a great example of community because at the end of the day, they are fighting for the same cause. And it's not an anti-science cause; it's more about the sovereignty of our people and the protection of our people and the place we live in. It's about the protection of the mountain, the protection of the environment because we've seen so much happen to Hawaii since the overthrow. Everything from the introduction of multitude of invasive species to corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta trialing experimental herbicides and pesticides near our schools, near our communities which are predominantly native Hawaiian. My cousin, she was a tri-athlete and she was running through the fields one day, and then she just got some weird neurological illness and is now permanently damaged from that. And this is because of the herbicides and pesticides being sprayed. They have no accountability to these communities, these corporates. Their only accountability is back to their shareholders. And the state allows them to just come in and do whatever they want because they’ve ticked the legal boxes and perhaps they’ve paid some amount of money for something. 

For our organization in terms of grounding us back to our community, we're a media organization. We started radio. Back in the golden days of radio, outdoor broadcasts were this thing. The equivalent of an outdoor broadcast today is live streaming. So, it was very common for radio to go out into the community and have a broadcast like at the opening of a new building or store, because the stores are like an advertising opportunity. So what we do a lot is we go into the community and we live stream. Then it was important for our people and for us, that’s kapa haka which is a traditional Maori dance. So we have kapa haka competitions. We have groups from different schools perform kapa haka and compete against each other. So, we live stream those which means we film it, we cut the performances up, and we make them available on demand for the community to watch. We also broadcast speech competitions, te reo Maori speech competitions, and any other event that our community asks. Our community comes to us and says, "Hey, we're doing this thing. Can you live stream it?" And we're in this position again where we have to say either yes or no, and no because we don’t have the resources to live stream everything. We can only do so much. And we have to balance that based on what we think the community wants. Like what would have more views because some of our funding is based on those metrics of viewership as opposed to value to the community. Because of our work, we're helping to shape some of these government departments see the work that we do. We're helping to realize that it isn’t just about large numbers, it's about the engagement and adding value to the community. So how we sort of reconnect with the community is that we're always out there in the community doing our work. And that just reminds the staff of their job. I get teary-eyed sometimes when I see our whole crew doing a great job and you see a young high school student on a stage talking about suicide, talking about things that are so important, not just to us, but to society, and giving them a platform to voice that to their community and also to the rest of the country. That reminds us of our job and of our duty and why we enjoy doing what we do. And all of our staff see it. And I think it brings that human aspect back into the work. We're not just stuck in our offices. Oftentimes, we are just stuck in our offices doing work. Every other month or at least four times a year, we have to go out into the community and do a live stream which helps them remember who we are and us remember who they are, and know their faces and know that we have a responsibility to provide for them. 

REIN: When I was looking into these protests at Mauna Kea, one thing that really stuck with me and it's the way that these protests are integrated into the cultural traditions that already existed. So for example, I learned that when the protesters went to the access road of the base of Mauna Kea, they organized, they formed a refuge - I think it's called pu'uhonua. There's a rich cultural tradition around this. The people there knew what this meant and knew how to organize in this way and are able to take advantage of their shared understanding, which I thought was really powerful. 

KEONI: Yeah. I grew Hawaiian in every way, but I'm not fluent in Olelo Hawai'i. I don’t do the hula. I don’t know very many chants. And I don’t know much about Hawaiian protocol because of the colonization, so much has been erased from our culture and they are families who have maintained some of that. For me, going on the Mauna, I was relearning Hawaiian protocol that I had never seen before because I had never had the opportunity to see it, because I was too busy going to school and getting a western education. But it is very well organized and protocol is really important. Three times a day, they have protocol which is they have some chants. And then if there are any special guests, these are people of importance whether it's the mayor or a chief, say from Tonga, we have a protocol where we welcome them into our place with the chant and they respond with a chant. And then they go up and they meet the leaders. And they are applying that to their protection. Because we're using the word protection, not protest. I think that’s important. 

Even when you're talking about kaitiakitanga, what is the protocol around dealing with certain types of data. For example, sometimes we live stream funerals which we call tangi. They're not exactly a funeral but the equivalent is a funeral. And so for us, it allows a family who are not able to travel to these places to pay respects to the person who has passed away to still be a part of that because a tangi, there's a lot of protocol in tangi and it varies based on the tribe in the country. The tangi are held on the marae which is like a gathering place for Maori. You have to be welcomed on to the marae via karanga which is like a call, and then you have to respond. And then there are speeches. And in terms of our job as a broadcaster, we need to respect the protocols around that. We don’t ever film the tupapaku which is the body. We don’t ever put the casket in the camera. We're not allowed to broadcast that. And then once the tangi is done, it's done. It's closed. We don’t make that available on demand for people to watch after the person has been buried. But we still hold on to that data. The fanau might want it. 

So now, we're entering into new realms. We were bringing our protocol with us. We're saying, "How do we apply our protocol to this particular thing?" And I think the Hawaiians would be like, "Okay, how do we apply our protocol to --" We had protocol for protecting, but how do we apply our protocol to protecting the Mauna in this particular instance where we have [inaudible] want to go up there and there's laws because it's on state land. So, we're not allowed to sell merchandise, we're not allowed to smoke or drink. So these protocols that we have three times a day. At the end of the protocol, the official Hawaiian staff, the leaders go up and remind everyone of our seven rules. And at the end of the day, it's be pono, be good, do the right thing and make sure you don’t smoke or have weapons or do drugs or sell anything because the state will use any opportunity they can to evict all of these peaceful protesters. And so having that protocol is so important. And I think you can see it in organizations or corporations who have a culture. I think protocol can help an organization to be more efficient or to ensure you're doing the right thing or to ensure that your staff are happier, whatever, whether it's a standup meeting every morning or going on a company retreat twice a year. You can sort of say those are our protocol. But I guess our protocols have been developed hundreds of years and we're sort of bringing in to these new realms. 

REIN: This really puts the lie to what startups in Silicon Valley call cultural fit. If you want to know what culture is, it's this sort of thing. It's secured values and beliefs and understanding and ideas and traditions that let you organize and show solidarity for each other. And it's not, "So we have catered lunches?"

[Laughter]

AMY: Yes. "How many different kinds of cold brew do we have?" I'm so fascinated by this community that’s growing up around protection, not the protest. I do think it is possible to have a shared culture that isn’t necessarily goes back hundreds of years. I think there are other kinds of communities that have developed around protests in the past that certainly have come up very quickly with sort those shared norms. And maybe that’s something I was thinking also about what you said about elders. We don’t have elders. I'm thinking about kind of the ages that exist in tech almost. It's like tech needs to sort of find more elders to listen to. That they could not just be all of the 'all white guys' that would be super helpful. 

REIN: Let's move to reflections then, if that’s okay with everyone. This is generally just an opportunity for us to share anything that was really meaningful or significant, or that we learned that we want to reflect on. 

My reflection builds on what Amy just said, and it’s that if we want to organize successfully in our communities -- I look at the organization that’s happening right now with Google and Amazon and various places in tech industry, that this sort of shared culture, this really deep connection between people enables a level of solidarity that I think we really need to be able to find, to build and organize these communities successfully. Here in Portland, actually a few blocks from where I live, there's an ice facility and there have been various sit-ins and tent communities that have been broken up by the police and I think about how important it is for those people that are engaging in those protests and they're organizing to have a shared sense of community and understanding of what it is that they're trying to do together, and how important that is for their solidarity and for their ability to be effective. 

AMY: This actually reminded me of a topic I wrote my senior thesis on a long time ago now, which was about feminist anti-nuclear activism in the early 80's where they did a similar thing. They built these women's camps around places that were housing nuclear missiles and things. And so, sort of reminding me to look back through our history for different examples for how groups of people in the tech example. So, we share skills or industry knowledge, but how do we find a way to come together. Let's look at how people have historically done that and how successful groups are doing that right now, and not do that not invented here thing where we have to invent it all ourselves. 

KEONI: What you just said there, not reinventing it. I had never really been to a protest. I had been to a march before, Hawaiian march, but I wasn’t at Standing Rock or a lot of these other indigenous protest or the one in Wall Street. When I went there, I want to know who's running the show. Who's leading this? There were a few leaders that stood out but you couldn’t really point and say exactly how this is being run. It was like a big network that was just operating efficiently. It was so interesting just to see that from the technical side of it, like how it's all happening. That was so interesting. And I was thinking it would be great if other groups can learn from that, if they have to stand up or protest for their rights or something. And that’s why I'm saying everyone should just go to Mauna Kea because you'll learn so much there and it's such an amazing just to feel the mana there and be a part of that, and understand why we're there. TMT might just be the catalyst. Some of you are calling it as today's Kaho'olawe where the government is bombing the crap out of this little island doing their ammunition testing. Maybe this is the present day Kaho'olawe. Or maybe this is finally that catalyst that gets us on our path to complete sovereignty. 

One thing I did want to reflect on, Rein, which you mentioned was how do we connect to our community. I know our organization does that, but I thought that was a really interesting thing to think about in a larger scale or for all sorts of communities or minorities or organizations. What enables us to do the right thing and what is the right thing? Those are really I think what it all boils down to. And so much could be resolve if we do the right thing. But what enables humans, individuals, or groups of people to do the right thing? I think that community connection, that connection back to a people or a society or a place or an environment, connection is something I personally feel helps it. But I think society more thinking on that issue or on that thing as what connects us to something to enable us to do the right thing because there are a lot of people out there trying to do the right thing. But I think for the most part, it might just be a few individuals who hold a lot of power who are doing the wrong thing and where in their life did they miss the boat and decided that it's all about them and not about anybody else. And I think even in tech, you might be in a place of privileges if you can say, "I'm not going to work at this organization because they don’t do the right thing." And it sucks that a lot of us aren’t in a position to just say, "Yeah, I can quit my job and go work somewhere else because my company is terrible." I wish more corporates and governments can do the right thing, whatever the right thing might be. And that evolves over time, I think, but I think there is a collective universal right thing at any point in time that most of us can agree on. 

REIN: That can be a whole other episode, I think. 

[Laughter]

KEONI: Okay.

REIN: This has been really great and I'm really glad you came on the podcast. And Amy, thank you for joining.

AMY: Thank you. Yes, this has been awesome and also slightly terrifying. 

[Laughter]

REIN: You did it!

AMY: But yeah, I really appreciated hearing about all of this stuff that I honestly didn’t know that there was a protest going on right now. So now, I have lots of reading to do. Thank you so much. This has been very interesting.