⏳ 2024 – ongoing

About

Mātou (“we are”) is a collective that exists to grow the digital infrastructure needed to support transformational growth for Māori communities. Māori already have centuries of experience in collective governance of shared resources and distributed governance. The problem is that most “modern” organisational tools on offer are reflections of colonial patterns. See Conway’s Law :

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — Melvin E. Conway

In Aotearoa (New Zealand), this means that Māori are currently struggling to organise collectively (as is their tradition) because most of the tools are fundamentally propertarian/ individualist/ overly top-down… in short, do not serve.

The core observation of Āhau (“I am”) was that we must start by rebuilding right tools starting with identity – this is the foundation by which we know ourselves (through our history, our relationships), and from here move into coordinating and building new things. Crucially, this must be rooted in absolute sovereignty (no rented domain names, no foreign servers controlling authorship, no singular source of truth).

As a radical exploration of data-sovereign identity Āhau succeeded in part, but ultimately surfaced challenges blocking our grand vision:

• identity tools must be free… but maintaining them with grants is unsustainable
• each community has it’s own tikanga (cultural practice), and we cannot (and should not) build for all of them
• Limited Liability Company governing an identity commons is a misalignment with our kaupapa

Mātou is being designed to be a multi-stakeholder entity which gives community real say in the systems being built, fosters ecosystems, acknowledges and rewards participation, growing wealth for all. Currently we are coordinating through Open Collective (with the NZ based Gift Trust as a fiscal host), which lets us work transparently under a charity umbrella.

Some projects we’ve been involved in recently::

• Supporting the Whangaroa Papa Hapū towards Treaty Settlement with cutting edge, culturally appropriate and resilient tools
• R+D on the fusion of millennia of Indigenous collective organising patterns with modern DAO tooling
• Partnering with K’aute Pasifika to prototype data-sovereignty preserving health/ wellbeing systems
• Guiding the Cardano Constitution process – practising world-scale collective governance