This is a quick photo story with a recap of the residency & retreat. More blogs from other events / conferences between October – December are coming soon!
The Maker Residency
From the 26th to the 29th of September, team Veditum was in the South Indian city of Kochi at the 2024 iteration of the ‘OpenNyAI Maker residency’ hosted by Agami at Tinkerhub.
Besides the organising team from Agami, the residency featured familiar faces like our partners from Ooloi Labs along with a host of new faces with fresh ideas and perspectives!
The residency brought together people from legal, policy and tech backgrounds with an array of changemakers in environmental and social justice, from Civil Society Organisations to paralegals.
Over four days, we spent the majority of our time at Tinkerhub – a space created by (and for) makers and students with a shared passion for technology and innovation.
The team from Tinkerhub was not only vital in ideating and co-creating innovative solutions to the justice-centric problem statements we developed, but in fostering a vibrant and friendly space within which we all worked together.
We began by breaking into groups and discussing broad challenges faced by practitioners in the social and environmental justice space. As part of Working Group 2 (WG2), we distilled our collective objective to evidence gathering and collation, a task that team Veditum with our experience on our project India Sand Watch are quite familiar with!
With our problem statement defined, we moved on to identifying gaps in solving these problems that could be overcome through creative uses of technology.
We offered our experience of working on the issue of river sand mining as a use case, and the process a user (person interested in taking positive action) might follow when starting from scratch.
Our goal: How can we make it easy for a user to end up with actionable evidence.
We decided to test the possibility of creating a simple messenger (whatsapp / telegram) based chat bot that would guide a user through this process of evidence generation for conflicts where boundaries play a role.
The backend would be powered by exhaustive databases (which need to be built), open datasets (like the Copernicus Sentinel Mission), and recent advancements in tools based on Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Here’s how it would go in an ideal situation:
- The user, prompted by the chat bot, inputs a conflict theme (in this case – sand mining) and a location (as latitude and longitude).
- These parameters narrow down the applicable laws and acts relevant to the location, time and conflict, and allow the bot to possibly search for mentions of the theme and location in relevant documents (for example, the meeting minutes of the State or District Environment Impact Assessment Authority).
- The system on the backend would attempt to extract all available location or spatial data (for example, the identified mining locations from the District Survey Report, or the area for which environmental clearance was granted).
- These different pieces of information would then be stitched together to generate information from which violations can be interpreted and turned into evidence.
For us at India Sand Watch, these preliminary exercises and the problem solving that followed, cohesively tied together different aspects of our work in environmental governance and social justice, with law, policy and technology.
It gave us a unique space to approach our challenges and problem solve with a group of people, each of whom brought specific skills, ideas and imaginations.
Over the time we spent at the residency, we brainstormed, created prototypes and presented our ideas and creations to the larger community – then went back to the drawing board to refine our prototype with the feedback and encouragement of the other groups!
The final output we were aiming for was a checklist of possible illegalities that the user (or any user) could reference when collating evidence for a case, along with a map showing the location of the conflict in relation to locations/areas from the other documents.
This output would ideally help legal practitioners to compare the nature and location of the conflict being reported with the permissible (or legal) nature and location of the activity in question.
We wrapped up the residency with celebratory energy for what we’d been able to co-create, and discussions and plans on how to take it forward.
Charged with new ideas and collective enthusiasm, we dreamed up big, but actionable, plans for evidence building, data liberation and collective action – with a shared commitment to working together to make these plans a reality!
Special thanks to Aditi and Atreyo from Agami for holding the Working Group 2 with just the right amount of cohesion that allowed us to be free!
Many of these ideas are being worked on through our existing and new projects. If you’d like to learn more, write to us at contact@veditum.org
The Team Retreat
After the residency, the Veditum team headed off to the coastal hamlet of Fort Kochi for a short but rejuvenating team retreat! True to form, we went on long, slow walks observing the people, places and happenings around us, punctuated by animated discussions about trees, birds and architecture.
We took the ferry to visit a fascinating museum that fueled long, enthusiastic conversations and observations of beautiful, old maps of Kochi. Throughout the trip, we enjoyed some delicious local food (notable mention: the tomato-onion uttapam that we had for breakfast twice!) and many many cups of lemon tea while watching the sunset.
Our little team of three eventually made our way back to our respective homes in our respective states, re-inspired by the residency and re-energised by our holiday – and absolutely in love with the beautiful port-city of Kochi and its kind, friendly people, delicious food, rich history, and stunning sunsets.
Thanks for reading through this blog post. Here are a few actions that you can take to stay connected and participate in our mission with us:
- Make a donation at this link – http://veditum.org/donate/ – to support Veditum’s work.
- Sign up for our newsletter at this link – http://veditum.substack.com – for regular updates in your email inbox.
- Sign up as a volunteer with Veditum at this link – http://veditum.org/work-with-veditum/