2026-07-09 –, The Seedbed
This panel dives into the critical questions surrounding the rapid development of agricultural technology. This panel brings together civil society leaders, global network builders, and researchers to critically assess the upstream and downstream risks of AgTech—from agricultural machinery and biotechnology to corporate digital enclosures. Moving beyond abstract critique, each speaker will share concrete frameworks and field methodologies illustrating how communities can evaluate, resist, or actively co-design tools that champion true food sovereignty and regional technical autonomy.
Technology Justice and AgTech Governance (Barbara Ntambirweki): Introducing technology justice frameworks tailored to African food systems. This section examines the regulatory and political risks of unvetted biotechnologies and top-down digital agriculture platforms ceding local control to multinational actors.
Peasant Agriculture & Resisting Digital Enclosure (Veronica Villa): Grounded in Latin American struggles, this presentation details how indigenous communities use community-led technology assessment guidelines to defend traditional crops like maize and resist the corporate financialization of global food systems.
Grassroots Energy Transitions & Local Land Use (Wedja Clementino): Mapping the intersections of technology, energy, and localized agriculture. This block explores how small-scale producers can design and govern their own sovereign energy installations to fuel localized food networks without falling into extractive supply chains.
Co-Design Methodologies & Grassroots Innovation Networks (Dr. Johnson Opoku-Asante): A deep dive into localized, low-cost engineering models stemming from the recent January 2026 IDDS VISTA Summit in Ghana. This segment highlights how the International Development Design Summits (IDDS) framework and the broader International Development Innovation Network (IDDN) ecosystem empower local communities to navigate the design cycle, build open-hardware tools, and institutionalize grassroots innovation capacity.
Moderated Dialogue & Audience Q&A: A facilitated cross-regional conversation mapping common patterns of corporate extraction and sharing tactical strategies for social movements to achieve technical autonomy.
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.
- Unconference: Setting the Agenda
- LABLAB Experience: Co-Creating Agroecological Tech and Bioregional Networks
- State of the Field: An Opening Conversation for D:Food
- Unconference Closing Gathering
- Social Aspects of Sovereign Technologies: Lightning Talks and Discussion
- Embodied Practice - Collective Intelligence Simulation
- Resistance, Resilience and Regeneration - The Role of Collective Infrastructure in Times of Collapse