2026-07-10 –, Solidarity Station
In the face of increasing climate disasters, social unrest, and the collapse of long-held economic systems, people around the globe have been building innovative solutions that empower, engage, and protect their communities - providing alternatives that are both locally relevant and globally applicable.
This conversation invites practitioners working across countries and contexts doing the work to be in community with one another, share what's working, what we're learning, and where the challenges lie.
Together, we'll explore what is truly required for community designed, owned, and governed infrastructure to effectively mitigate the growing effects of climate, social, and economic rupture, and approaches to scale.
Across different geographies and domains, practitioners are quietly constructing infrastructure that communities can own, govern, and depend on, not as a fallback, but as a foundation. They're not waiting for the conditions to be right. They're building it now, in the middle of the collapses — climate, economic, and social — that make it necessary.
What connects them is a shared evolution: away from reactive response and toward infrastructure that makes communities harder to destabilize in the first place. There is a difference between infrastructure that helps communities survive a crisis and infrastructure that prevents the crisis from taking hold. The most durable community infrastructure doesn't just hold in emergencies, it accumulates capacity with use. Relationships deepen. Skills are distributed. Governance gets tested and refined. The community becomes more capable, not more dependent, over time.
That arc is the intended through-line of this panel. Whether building physical or digital infrastructure, each practitioner has a different domain and a different context, but they're all navigating the same design challenge: how do you build infrastructure that communities genuinely own, that holds under pressure, and that gets stronger with use rather than creating new dependencies?
This is a session about practice: the hard-won knowledge of people who've built things that actually work for mutual benefit and collective capacity.
Madelynn Martiniere is a facilitator, designer, and strategist specializing in collective innovation—the conditions and infrastructure that enable ecosystems to cultivate community resilience and tackle wicked problems together.
For almost two decades, she has worked across sectors and scales to build innovation ecosystems that center open access, community ownership, and collective power. Her portfolio spans the globe: co-designing an entrepreneurship hub for refugees in Uganda, leading development for a digital platform for sustainable fisheries in Latin America, facilitating data sovereignty initiatives toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and stewarding a global movement of founders and funders building businesses that balance profit and purpose.
A co-founder of Armillaria and former Executive Director of Zebras Unite, she has spent over 15 years bridging local practice with systems-level change—developing the social, organizational, financial, and technical infrastructure that enables communities to produce, govern, and share the technologies shaping our future.
She currently serves on the boards of Communitere International, which builds community resilience infrastructure in crisis and post-crisis contexts, and the Holochain Foundation, advancing peer-to-peer technology for community-owned digital infrastructure.
Michael Suantak is the founder of ASORCOM (Alternative Solutions for Rural Communities) and eimiAI. Operating at the intersection of indigenous rights and decentralized technology, he engineers autonomous, offline-first communication networks in extreme conflict zones, specifically along the India-Myanmar border.
During state-sponsored internet blackouts and kinetic warfare, Michael’s work focuses on keeping community knowledge, medical coordination, and human agency alive. He is the architect of the "Digital Tarzan" philosophy, which advocates for frugal, rugged infrastructure built from the soil up. His field deployments combine 12V DC-native solar power, tactical LoRa mesh networks, HF radio, and localized edge AI to ensure marginalized communities retain cognitive and digital sovereignty when the centralized grid fails.
Michael believes that true autonomy is not given—it is engineered. His ongoing mission is to help rural populations transition from vulnerable digital consumers into resilient digital sovereigns.
- The Dark Horizon Simulation: Architecting Autonomous Comms in an Extreme Conflict Zone
- Cognitive Sovereignty at the Edge: Co-Designing Offline AI for Conflict Zones
- Voices of the Edge: How to Build Low-Resource Language AI for Rural Communities
- Beyond the Canopy: Building Local Networks & Marginalized Public AI at the Rural Edge
- The Ancient Signals Treasure Hunt: Pre-Physics Communication Models & Optical Cryptography
Engie is an Indigenous Technologist and founding member of Mātou Collective, working at the intersection of Indigenous data sovereignty, digital identity, and emerging technologies. Her work is grounded in kaupapa Māori design and collective ownership, supporting Indigenous-led approaches to technology.
In collaboration with Tauhokohoko - https://www.tauhokohoko.nz/ - Matou has developed an Indigenous Digital Identity Protocol and is advancing community-led digital sovereignty and trade initiatives through the development of the Indigenous Digital Sovereignty Stack, enabling Māori and Indigenous communities to govern, and sustain their own digital infrastructure.
Tinker, florester and admirer of originary cultures. I believe and live a better world where communities are enpowered and self-governed, people have the time and spirit to tend their human and non-human peers and tools are hacked or built for the well-being of people and the planet.
Richard Ng (Kānaka Maoli) is a member of the CGO as the Program Manager for IndigiDAO a community governed program that works with Indigenous entrepreneurs to design community governed structures leveraging decentralized technologies. He is also the Principal Investigator of Project Kiaʻi focused on creating a protocol for Indigenous communities to design their digital infrastructure through the deployment of a sovereign stack. He is focused on bringing Indigenous and value systems as a core element is designing systems of governance for all of humanity.
Founder of the Tekoporã project, technical advisor, and core contributor to the DWeb community. She focuses on building decentralized infrastructure alongside grassroots groups like the Ecovida Agroecology Network to support sustainable forestry and food sovereignty in Brazil.
I'm currently a postdoc in Computer Science at the University of Washington, seeking a software or network engineering, research, or PM role for Summer/Fall 2026. I've deployed community networks around the world, and teach technical networking at the Tribal Broadband Bootcamp (TBB). Since 2019, I'm a Founder and Director of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Local Connectivity Lab (LCL). Our Seattle Community Network (SCN) digital equity project builds DIY Internet infrastructure serving hundreds of users.