National Geographic highlights work by Jen Osha, a West Virginia PhD student in helping native Amazonians defend their land using geospatial technology.
Osha said that participatory GIS—the blending of local geographic knowledge with modern mapping data—can help indigenous communities stop the loss of ancestral lands and decrease Indian’s reliance on foreigners.
When I was in school we talked a lot about “approprite technology” - how integrate technology with the existing culture. I witnessed that first hand in South Africa when those collecting data with GPSs to track malaria wrote down coordinates, instead of saving them in the device. My hosts explained that culturually, if the workers didn’t have a physical item (a filled out form) at the end of the day, they felt they’d done no work.
