2026-07-10 –, The Seedbed
How do small-scale agroecological farmers successfully incorporate and govern their own technologies? This session bridges the vital social dimensions of decentralized tech with real-world, grassroots applications. Drawing from her work in Brazil, Nadia Coelho Pontes will open the session by unpacking the human, cultural, and community elements required to build digital infrastructure that truly serves local needs. The session will then transition into case studies from Luke Smith (Origin Co-op), Tamisha Lee (Jamaica Network of Rural Women Producers), and Abdallah Nyangason (African Bee Consultants), who will share their firsthand experiences building community-led solutions across different global contexts.
Finally, all presenters will converge for a 30-minute interactive discussion, inviting attendees to synthesize the learnings and reflect on their own contexts and regions.
This session explores how decentralized tools can be introduced to support—rather than disrupt—existing grassroots community networks. It is divided into three interconnected segments that move logically from a social framing to real-world examples, concluding in an interactive group discussion. The block begins with an introductory framing analyzing the cultural social fabric and trust frameworks required before rural communities can meaningfully adopt or interface with sovereign technical models. It then shifts to a localized showcase highlighting practical implementations of food sovereignty, parametric insurance architectures, and polycultural farm systems built directly from the needs of the land. The session concludes with a structured participatory dialogue mapping common global patterns of corporate tech enclosure and co-creating regional pathways toward systemic 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
- Ethical AgTech Panel: Assessing Risk and Cultivating Technological Sovereignty
- Embodied Practice - Collective Intelligence Simulation
- Resistance, Resilience and Regeneration - The Role of Collective Infrastructure in Times of Collapse
I am a Tanzanian beekeeper, api-tourism guide, apitherapy practitioner, and community educator. I am the founder of African Bees Consultants, an organization dedicated to representing Africanized bees as a force for ecological resilience and economic justice. Our work is built on three pillars: conserving African forests through beekeeping, eliminating poverty in local communities through commercial beekeeping, and connecting African producers with international markets. I offer api-tourism experiences, apitherapy treatments, beehive air inhalation sessions, and bee consultation services — blending ancestral knowledge with modern ecological practice. I also serve as a board member of The Lulu Foundation, an international NGO based in California that supports community-led innovation across Africa. My work is grounded in the belief that African bees — and the communities who tend them — hold solutions the world urgently needs.