Dorn Cox
This is a Joint proposal - but happy to provide my Bio in addition to those of the other participants. - Dorn Cox is a Farmer, Author and Researcher and the editor of the Talk to the... Handbook and has been a steward of Farm Hack and the OpenTEAM federated infrastructure for nearly a decade. He convenes the GIAA Infrastructure Working Group and is the primary practitioner refining the question-design discipline that the tool implements.
Anamika Dey (Honey Bee Network / SRISTI / GIAN) has spent more than a decade documenting and stewarding the Indian grassroots innovation archive — over a million records across three federated databases, with a working multilingual AI agent in production. Caroline (Schola Campesina) carries the European agroecology and CSIPM coordination thread. David Otieno (Kenyan Peasant League) provides the ground-truth demonstration of how a sovereign database is actually used at the mobile-phone ceiling of accessibility.
SJ Klein leads the Agricultural Knowledge Concordance at Code for Science & Society (CS&S), and active in the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, with thought-partner networks across Wikimedia, Internet Archive, Code for Science & Society (CS&S), and the AI Commons House. SJ's background in mass-scale community-edited knowledge infrastructure — Wikipedia, Wikidata, and the broader open-knowledge tradition — is the discipline the AKC adapts from millions-of-contributors editing patterns to deep-interview stewardship patterns. Wikipedia is what happens when a community owns its own editorial discipline at scale; the AKC and the tool that supports it are what happens when that ownership extends from the textual content to the knowledge-mapping practice itself.
Sessions
Innovation is happening every day on farms, fishing boats, and community plots — most of it never digital. Networks like Prolinnova, the Kenyan Peasant League, and the wider Grassroots Innovations Assembly for Agroecology (GIAA) have spent decades sharing this knowledge through farmer innovation fairs, printed materials, person-to-person exchange, and small circles where attribution and trust are kept intact. As distributed-web tools mature, there is real risk of repeating old patterns — extraction, scale, communication breakdown — with new vocabulary. This session is a grounded conversation from networks rooted in Agroecology (Nyéléni 2015): what currently works, what farmers fear, and what genuine alliance with the DWeb community would actually look like.
This hands-on technical workshop walks through the architecture of the Farm Hack Box — a Raspberry Pi 5 with 1 TB of NVMe storage, drawing 27 watts on a 50-watt solar panel, hosting approximately thirty services and over a million records, federating with peer boxes through a Tailscale tailnet, a Forgejo git server, an experimental Holochain layer, and a content-addressed Concordance card registry — and shows in operation how each layer of the stack maps to a specific DWeb Principle: Human Agency, Distributed Benefits, Mutual Respect, Humanity, and Ecological Awareness. The workshop is the technical companion to the political and institutional framings of the same infrastructure, and is calibrated for DWeb participants who want to see the protocols compose in service of a real working community before the abstractions appear.
The Ethical Technology Assessment (ETA) framework, Inspired by the Grassroots innovation assembly for Agroecology (GIAA) and developed through OpenTEAM and the Agricultural Knowledge Concordance, is a community-owned scoring practice for technology that works more like Consumer Reports or Human Rights Watch field documentation than a compliance badge — with three confidence tiers, claim-level evidence threading, structured dispute resolution, and automatic confidence decay that forces re-review. This five-minute lightning talk introduces the framework, demonstrates the live single-page assessment tool covering Hardware, Software, Datasets, Indigenous Data Sovereignty, and Seeds & Germplasm, and leaves the audience with one clear next action: score a tool and contribute to a score in their own community before the camp ends.
GIAA member networks — the Honey Bee Network and GIAN in India (over one million records), Prolinnova across Africa-Asia-Latin America, L'Atelier Paysan in France, Schola Campesina in Europe, Farm Hack and OpenTEAM in North America, and the Kenyan Peasant League — are federating their tools, data, and knowledge commons without collapsing into centralization, supported by the Agricultural Knowledge Concordance. This hands-on workshop demonstrates the working prototypes of both hardware and software infrastructure in production and surfaces the live governance tensions — federation without flattening, Prior Informed Consent and conditional-use licensing, membership criteria, and federation failure modes