What this is

A workshop about a problem GainForest spends most of its time on: the data, the analysis, and the money in forest stewardship usually flow through several middlemen before they reach the people doing the work. We want to walk through three concrete pieces of how we have been trying to remove some of those middlemen, then turn the room loose on whether this kind of stack would matter in your own community.

Who we are

GainForest is a small non-profit working on direct payments to forest stewards. We work in a handful of sites in Latin America, Asia-Pacific and Africa, mostly with indigenous and local community partners. We have been at this for several years and recently won an XPRIZE Rainforest for our work.

What "direct" means here

When someone in the global north pays for forest protection, the money usually moves through several hands before any of it reaches a person who lives in the forest. Each hop takes a cut, and decisions about whose work counts get made far from the people doing it. Forest data is the same shape: it gets collected by external researchers, analysed in foreign labs, and used to make claims about places where the researchers do not live.

Three things have to be true at the same time to change this:

1. The communities collecting the data own the data. They can share it, hold it back, or delete it.

2. The models that read the data can run on their own devices. They do not need to upload anything to a cloud to be useful.

3. The money that depends on the data reaches them. It does not get spent on the analysis chain.

We call this open nature finance. The "open" is about transparency in who gets paid for what.

What happens in the 60 minutes

5 minutes. Intro and the question.

20 minutes. Three field stories from GainForest, around six minutes each.

20 minutes. Small-group discussion. Two prompts:

• When does keeping data local matter more than sharing it?
• What kind of verification do you actually need to send money to a stranger across an ocean?

13 minutes. Report-backs and an open conversation about what came up.

2 minutes. Close, with links to the relevant projects.

Why this fits Solidarity Tech

The three pieces above are all power transfers. Data sovereignty moves the right to speak about a place from outside experts to the people who live there. Local AI moves the inference loop from a cloud you do not control to a device you do. Direct finance moves money from intermediaries to the people doing the work. Solidarity tech is what you get when you wire these together and the wire holds.

What we need

A room for around thirty people. Power for a couple of laptops and one small demo device. A screen for slides. Wifi or ethernet helpful but not required, since the demo runs offline.

What we want out of the session

Useful pushback. We are not done figuring out what the right shape of this stack is, especially the verification piece. Hearing from a room that has thought about adjacent problems is worth more to us than applause.