We are delighted to share that Digital Democracy has been named a member of the Mozilla Foundation’s Data Futures Lab 2022 and awarded a $100,000 Prototype Fund grant. We are excited to work with Mozilla and our fellow cohort members – Drivers Coop, Driver’s Seat Cooperative and Place Trust – on developing new paradigms in responsible data stewardship, and working to support communities to have greater ownership and control over their own data.

The Prototype Fund will allow us to improve the peer-to-peer (P2P) database for human rights and environmental data used by Mapeo. This P2P system enables offline data collection, synchronization, and management. We build Mapeo on a P2P database in order to give communities control and stewardship over their own data, keeping data local with full transparency over how data is shared and with whom.

With the help of the Prototype Fund, we will develop new UX paradigms for managing access to a decentralized dataset, and revamp the user experience for synchronizing the P2P database in Mapeo. We will also develop clear guides and training resources for best practices in responsible data management, and showcase these on the Earth Defenders Toolkit platform.

To learn more about the Data Futures Lab, read this article on ZDNet, as well as Mozilla’s profile of Digital Democracy highlighting our history, tools and values after a conversation with Dd Programs Team member Rudo Kemper: Mapeo Helps Marginalized Communities Collect Data, Reclaim Land Rights