How do multiple agricultural communities steward a shared commons of tools, data, and knowledge — without centralization, without capture, and without losing the specificity of place?

The GIAA April 2026 working paper Whose Knowledge, Whose Infrastructure? documents the extraction pattern this federation is built to displace. When a farmer in Andhra Pradesh documents her traditional rice variety, the songs her grandmother sang at planting, the harvest calendar refined across generations — that knowledge does not belong in a corporate database, a university repository, or an AI training set. Yet that is precisely where agricultural knowledge has been going for the past decade. Agrible acquired by Nutrien (2018). Granular split and sold (2022). ApRecs sunset (2025). Farmhand ceased operations (2025). Microsoft's 2026 confirmation before the French Senate that it cannot guarantee data sovereignty from US CLOUD Act requests, regardless of where data is physically stored. 95 percent of Indian traditional agricultural knowledge is held by elders who are absent from every current AI training dataset (Prof. Anil Gupta, Honey Bee Network). The pattern is not theoretical. It is the ordinary operation of the platform economy.

The institutional working paper Commons-Enabling Infrastructure for Agricultural Knowledge Systems (WP3) frames the institutional response: Commons-Enabling Infrastructure built on four pillars — technical (self-hostable hardware and software, federated and offline-first); social (Agricultural Knowledge Concordance methodology, stewardship councils, Commons Governance Organizations); legal (Ag Data Use Agreements, an Agriculturalists' Bill of Data Rights, Prior Informed Consent enforced at query time, CopyFair licensing); and financial (CGOs as fiscal sponsors, embedded commerce through the Farm Hack POS, public-civic bridges, development-bank project components). All four pillars are operationally visible in this workshop.

The GIAA Infrastructure Working Group has spent the past year building toward a shared infrastructure across member networks. Each network has its own databases, its own tools, its own governance. Each is being asked, increasingly, to open into a common pool without losing what makes it itself. This workshop shows the working prototype — a meta-registry hosted on the GIAA website and mirrored on member sites, a local-first sovereign database that fits on a single Raspberry Pi 5 with 1 TB of NVMe storage, a federated JSON-LD tool registry with Ethical Technology Assessment scoring embedded, and a Prior Informed Consent layer designed so that open does not have to mean exposed. The session is hands-on; participants will see the federated instances, propose tool cards, score them on the ETA dimensions, work through real governance tensions in small groups, and commit their outputs to a shared Git repository in the session.

The networks federating their knowledge in this work.

Honey Bee Network and GIAN (India) hold over one million abandoned-patent records, 131,000 open-source practices from the National Innovation Foundation, and the published Honey Bee archive, with a working multilingual AI agent operating in Hindi, Bangla, Manipuri, and Nagamis among other Indian languages — currently migrating from cloud credits toward in-house hosting on hardware identical to the Farm Hack Box.
Prolinnova has documented decades of community-partner innovation in ecologically-oriented agriculture and natural-resource management across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Schola Campesina convenes European agroecology praxis curriculum, CSIPM coordination, and the working-paper pipeline that feeds the CFS High-Level Forum on AI on 30 July 2026.
L'Atelier Paysan maintains the French open-source tool registry for peasant farming and runs participatory design workshops on farms.
Farm Hack and OpenTEAM hold the North American open-hardware tool registries, farmOS, LiteFarm, the ETA framework, and the Farm Hack Box reference implementation.
Kenyan Peasant League brings the East African smallholder perspective and the demonstration of how a sovereign database is actually used in a context where the mobile phone is the technology ceiling.
Tzoumakers (Greece) brings the Mediterranean open-hardware cooperative practice.

Each of these networks carries knowledge the others do not. None should be flattened into a single corpus. The federation under development is designed structurally to prevent that flattening — the Honey Bee Network's million records, if pooled naively, would dominate the federation by weight, and the design explicitly addresses this through thematic, proportional contribution rather than full-corpus merge.

Technical support draws on three lineages. The Agricultural Knowledge Concordance project, led by SJ Klein at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society with collaborations across Wikimedia, Internet Archive, Code for Science & Society, and the AI Commons House, provides the epistemic layer — structured interviews, Concordance cards, AGROVOC alignment, a way of making knowledge travel with attribution intact. The Open Science Hardware Foundation and its Internet-in-a-Box lineage provide the hardware tradition — physically distributing content-addressed archives on hardware that communities own. The Farm Hack Box is the direct descendant of that tradition. The Internet Archive provides the preservation tradition — content at risk of loss in institutional custody is replicated into community custody.

The Ethical Technology Assessment as the federation's accountability architecture. Adopted explicitly from the WP3 framing for institutional audiences: the ETA is not a badge. It is a living assessment protocol with three confidence tiers (Provisional / Peer-reviewed / Audited), claim-level evidence threading, structured dispute resolution, and automatic confidence decay over time — more analogous to a Consumer Reports independent test methodology or a Human Rights Watch field documentation process than to a compliance certification. This architecture makes ETA assessments contestable, improvable, and durable in ways that badge-based certifications are not. The workshop participants will use the ETA framework directly to score a tool card live and watch it commit to the shared Git repository under the three-tier confidence model.

What participants will do in the session. First, a ten-minute tour of federated instances, live: the Farm Hack registry, a Honey Bee subset, a Schola Campesina index, a Prolinnova sample. Same schema, different curation, different governance — each looks like itself; together they are a federation. Second, a fifteen-minute small-group exercise where each group proposes a tool or practice card for the federation, assigns ETA scores on five dimensions (Data Sovereignty, Accessibility, Ecological Impact, Community Benefit, Transparency) and assigns permissions (public, consented-sharing, held-back), then compares how good looks different across contexts. Third, a fifteen-minute hardware walkthrough of the 1 TB sovereign database prototype, with attention to what is on it and how nodes find each other. Fourth, a fifteen-minute facilitated discussion on four live governance tensions:

Federation without flattening — how do communities contribute proportionally and thematically when one network's corpus is a thousand times another's?
Licensing and intellectual property — Prior Informed Consent, polycentric licensing, source-organization defaults with override; how do we make an open federation where open does not mean exposed?
Membership criteria — not resolved here, surfaced and committed to drafting at the GIAA Infrastructure Working Group meeting in Berlin on 13 July.
Federation failure modes — when does it scale, when does it break?

Fifth, a five-minute close with commitments that feed directly into the Berlin meeting and into the joint GIAA / CGO / AKC ratification sequence running August through October.

Where this session sits in the GIAA arc. Upstream from this workshop: the political-frame opener (Grounding the Web: A Reality Check from the Farms and Fields) and the methodology session (Talk to the Stewards). Downstream: the GIAA Infrastructure Working Group meeting in Berlin on 13 July ratifies the schema, the reference dataset manifest, the ethical frame, and the membership criteria draft this workshop seeds. The CFS High-Level Forum on AI on 30 July in Rome is where the policy framing carries forward into FAO and the multilateral conversation. The joint GIAA / CGO / AKC session in September, the CGO Charter ratification through October, and the People's Festival of Innovation in Delhi in November 2026 are the subsequent points at which the federation is pressure-tested and ratified.