Keoni DeFranco
Managing Director, Purple Maiʻa Foundation | Minister of the Interior, Nation of Hawaiʻi
Keoni DeFranco is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) technologist, cultural practitioner, kalo farmer, and advocate for Hawaiian national independence. As Managing Director of Purple Maiʻa Foundation and Minister of the Interior for the Nation of Hawaiʻi, he works at the intersection of Indigenous innovation, regenerative agriculture, and community self-determination.
As former founder and CEO of Lua Technologies, Keoni brings more than a decade of enterprise software experience to Indigenous technology development. He leads Purple Maiʻa's innovation initiatives, including the KILO ecosystem, an open platform integrating environmental monitoring, soil science, and artificial intelligence to support watershed stewardship, food systems, and the return of ancestral Hawaiian lands.
Grounded in aloha ʻāina, his work bridges traditional ecological knowledge with modern engineering to advance data sovereignty and locally governed computing as pathways toward ecological resilience, economic autonomy, and ultimately, Hawaiian political sovereignty.
Session
As industrial agricultural platforms accelerate corporate data enclosure, predatory data scraping, and top-down digital monitoring, grassroots movements are reclaiming the technical architectures that govern their livelihoods. This panel showcases practical infrastructure co-designed directly alongside land stewards across three distinct global contexts. Featuring field insights from rural India, the open grain fields of the upper Midwest, and Indigenous-led labs in Hawaiʻi, the speakers will demonstrate how decentralized systems can amplify localized innovation and support data sovereignty.