Name: Dr. Katharina Ruckstuhl - Research Infrastructure for the Pluriverse

Description: Dr. Katharina Ruckstuhl - Research Infrastructure for the Pluriverse

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Upload Date: 2022-08-26T00:00:00.0000000

Transcript: Language: EN.
Segment:0 .
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SPEAKER 1: So what I'll do now is pass off to Rhonda Ross Rhonda is representing one of our major sponsors, the American Chemical Society and the CAS Division. Rhonda is also a member of our board of directors. So Rhonda, over to you.
RHONDA ROSS: Thank you, John. On behalf of ACS, I'm really happy to be here. And we, as an organization, are, once again, very proud to be sponsoring the NISO Plus conference. It's a great pleasure and honor for me to introduce the closing keynote speaker, Dr. Katharina Ruckstuhl. Dr. Ruckstuhl is an Associate Dean and Senior Research Fellow at the Otago Business School and is a Maori lead of a major New Zealand "grand challenge," Science for Technological Innovation.
RHONDA ROSS: She has leadership roles with her tribe, Ngai Tahu, and is an ORCID board member, as well as a member of the IEEE working party on standards for Indigenous people's data. She has published on Maori language, mining, Maori economy, Maori science, as well as technology. And she is currently co-editing a book on Indigenous development. Dr. Ruckstuhl's talk is entitled Research Infrastructure for the Pluriverse.
RHONDA ROSS: And so, without further ado, please join me in welcoming Dr. Katharina Ruckstuhl.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: [NON-ENGLISH].. Thank you, Rhonda. And thank you, Todd. And I have really been enjoying the conference, so far. So thank you for that introduction. So I'm going to start with a traditional Maori greeting. And the reason that I want to start with that is that, for some of you, it's late in the evening. And so this is a little bit like an evening story.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And it's a story, as all stories should be, about beginnings. And then from that story, I will move to another story, which will then lead to the topic of this discussion today. [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] This story is a narrative of creation.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: It starts from the void or [NON-ENGLISH].. And then it moves through various states of darkness or [NON-ENGLISH]. And then from that to the dawn, and then to the day. So this particular story, in a way, is moving from that which is obscure or unseen, but has potential, through various states of understanding or [NON-ENGLISH],, which can sometimes feel like you are clasping or grasping in the night, and then to a light, or enlightenment, an inkling of something.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And then, suddenly, you have it. And often, in Maori thinking, we think of this as the journey of knowledge, from what we don't know to what we can then grasp. However, this particular incantation, and it is an old one, also takes us to the creative forces, or the atua, or the gods who have given rise to the Maori world.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And in our narratives, these are Papatuanuku, the earth mother, and Ranginui, the sky father. And while both of these very famous gods in Polynesian history are well-known. Other stories are also known. So Ranginui had a first wife. And her name was Pokoharuatepo. And for Papatuanuku it was Tangaroa, the god the sea.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So I'm going to tell you a story now of the Voyage of Aoraki. And Aoraki was the eldest Aorake and [INAUDIBLE],, and he had three brothers. And they're very important to my tribal group of Ngai Tahu. My tribal group has a 3,000 year journey to where it is today in the South Island of Aotearoa, New Zealand. The journey started in Southeast Asia, island hopped its way through Micronesia, and then to East Polynesia, finally settling in New Zealand and about 1,200 A.D. in a series of ocean migrations.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And this particular story carries traces of those voyages, and also those memories. So in this story, Aoraki and his brothers descend from the heavens and travel in a waka, or a canoe, to the South Island to explore and to fish. After some time there and wishing to return to the heavens, Aoraki begins his incantation, perhaps like the one that I started with.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: However, because Aoraki's brothers were very quarrelsome, he lost his concentration, and consequently he did not correctly perform the incantation to take he and his brothers home. So therefore, the waka-- the canoe-- broke into several parts with the prow at one part of the island and the stern at the other. And in between, the waka and its crew were turned into stone and formed the mountains that today we know as the Southern Alps, or Ka Tiritiri-o-te-Moana.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And Aoraki is the peak. After that, and sometime after that, Aoraki's grandson, Tu-te-Rakiwhanoa, travels through the whole land and across the coastlines, and he names each place that he comes to. So these are the first names. But these names were then disappeared, I guess you could say, by those who came next. However, we do not forget these names.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So, what can we understand from this narrative? So at its simplest, we might say that this is a myth or a legend to explain some geographical features-- a mountain range that happened to look like an upturned waka with Aoraki as the keel of the range. And one might assume, as the first Europeans to Aotearoa, New Zealand did, that we Maori were a superstitious lot with primitive beliefs.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: However, if we're attentive to the detail, it also tells us that there are a lot of names there, and those names were brought across a 3,000 year old journey from Southeast Asia. Thus, Aoraki is a name that can be found in Tahiti and also the Cook Islands. So while the story has fantastical elements, the names claim and relocate name. We might also view the story as moral instruction-- how leaders are supposed to behave.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So despite being a demigod, Aoraki failed in his key role, which was to protect his waka and his crew from misfortune through correct adherence to protocol and incantation. And the consequence of that they were turned to stone and became a mountain range. So in other words, Aoraki failed to observe the correct standard that had been laid down for him, and the consequence was fatal. But for those of us who came next, we're very grateful.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And I've taken some time to narrate this tale because I think it helps to elucidate the following quotation-- and I'm very thankful to Stacy Ellison Kessler who mentioned this at an earlier NISO workshop in December. A system's effectiveness in organizing information in part a function of an ideology that states the ambitions of its creators and what they hope to achieve.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So let's take this quotation and apply it to the Aoraki narrative. And we need to understand that word, ideology. So an ideology, according to Merriam-Webster, is a manner or the content of thinking characteristic of an individual group or culture, the integrated assertions, theories and aims that constitute a sociopolitical program, a systematic body of concepts, especially about human life or culture, and visionary theorizing.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So, what was the ideology of ancient Maori? At its heart, we might say that the main ideology was continuance through observation of correct behavior. And much of that correct behavior was through one's relationships, not only with tribal members but also the gods and the natural environment. Naming places creates that relationship.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So relationships are a key ideology of Maori, and indeed of many indigenous people. So in terms of organizing information as a function of an ideology, how did we do that? Did we have a systematic body of concepts? How were they integrated? What were their characteristics? And in a word, our organizing principle was whakapapa. At its simplest, whakapapa means to place in layers, to stack flat, and it also means to recite genealogy.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So here is my whakapapa-- and that's an image of my great grandmother. If I was to trace back further, as I am able to, I would be able to name the ancestors who came from the Pacific, how these relate to other tribal groups in Aotearoa, how they relate to more recent kin. I would also be able to name these back to certain gods, or atua, as you can see here.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So here are the atua. However, whakapapa does not only organize human and god relationships. It also organizes relationships between humans, gods, and all animate and inanimate beings in the universe. Thus, we have lizards and fishes, who are descended from Tongaroa, the god of the sea. We have plants, and particularly gourds, that come from Rommel.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And this is a really interesting one in that it's not only plants, but here we have vega, which is a star. And down from here, we have caterpillars, moths, and plants. So what was the organizing principle there? We have, as I said, celestial [INAUDIBLE],, puppet so this is Te Ra, the sun, Te Marama, the moon, and [INAUDIBLE],, who are the stars.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And they, too, have names. We even have the whakapapa of stones. So these are detailed and systematic. And what is the organizing principle? And really, it's around continuance through right relationships with the natural world, and indeed, with the universe. So this raises a question.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Given that Maori, and indeed many indigenous peoples have ideologies that are similar, that is, maintaining right relationships with the world, of which people are but one aspect of that world, can modern research infrastructures be effective? And not just efficient in organizing information to reflect an ideology of right relationship. And this leads us to, well, what is a right relationship with the world of indigenous people?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And by extension, what is the wrong relationship? So in the next section, I'm going to lay out some of the rights and wrongs, and I'm going to end with some reflections on potential future applications of these ideas for clear reversal research infrastructure. So what are some wrongs? Well, the first problem I'm going to identify is terra nullius thinking.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So, what is terra nullius thinking? Well, terra nullius itself means, a land that is no one's. And we can see an example of this in the instructions to Captain James Cook in 1769. So, cook was about to head off to the Pacific on his first voyage-- he undertook three-- to document the transit of Venus. And this was funded by the Royal Society of London, so it was a scientific endeavor.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And learned societies are part of research infrastructure. However, they do not sit outside the customs or ideologies of the time. So Cook was also instructed by the admiralty to take possession of uninhabited countries. Cook didn't discover any lands that were uninhabited. But the ideology behind it was long standing, and that enabled a justification to take lands from those who didn't inhabit land in the same way as Europeans.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Thus, those who used the land but whose residences might have been cyclical or seasonal were deemed to not inhabit the land. Hence, land could be taken or alienated. And that's the pattern we particularly see in New Zealand, Canada, the US, and Australia. So although there have been many, many treaties with indigenous peoples of those countries, in effect there was a type of terra nullius thinking going on.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And that still plays out today. So while land was alienated, a lot of other things were alienated, both tangible and intangible. And these included alienation from one's physical environment-- mountains, rivers, seas, animals, rocks, stones, all those things that I showed you in the whakapapa-- alienation from traditional food sources, from traditional labor and economy, from cultural pursuits, including language, narrative, songs, and rituals, literally from your physical belongings such as your clothes or your everyday objects and you're revered objects.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And ultimately, they'd alienate you from yourself as a tribal person. So despite this, communal knowledge has persisted in pockets orally, through elders, through wise people, through protest, and through legal challenges. And of course, in documentation in records, archives, museums, photos, sound recordings. So the impact of terra nullius was to transfer not only land but knowledge to other people and into infrastructures where it could be stored, categorized, studied, and then reassembled for the purposes and ideologies of the owner of the infrastructure.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So what were those ideologies? One could say ownership and trade, accounting and record keeping, documentation, preservation of public education. However, a core was certainly knowledge dissemination, whether in books or articles, or legal texts, or public records published by lunar society, such as the Royal Society of London, and in New Zealand, the Royal Society of New Zealand.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And now, of course, through excess, often open source, to the digital records. So this is the idea of universality, the idea that knowledge can somehow freely move and serve the common good. However, indigenous people often ask, well, whose good is served by the common good? And as this quotation from Linda Smith states, research has often been one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous vocabulary because research has taken specific indigenous collective goods, tangible and intangible, and used them to benefit other people.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: However, indigenous people have not forgotten their collective goods, the collective knowledge, or their collectively held places and environments. So in other words, these collectively held goods are emblematic of distinct worlds based on particular types of relationships with particular types of environments. However, what we've had until quite recently in research infrastructure is what Colombian academic Arturo Escobar describes as the one world world approach.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So this is an idea whereby worlds, such as the one that I started this talk with, are actively produced as non-existent and non-credible alternative to the current dominant world. And most people would say that is a colonized world. And by this I mean viewing the story of Aoraki and his brothers as myths or primitive religious belief, one that denies other possibilities for such coded knowledge.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: I.e. that it might even be a type of scientific understanding of the world, that it in fact might be quite innovative because it focuses on other types of organizing principles that help us answer the questions of today. And answering questions of today is the mission that research infrastructures enable. So some are going to disagree that so-called myth and science can be viewed in the same breath.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And many places and countries, including my own, have maintained a very strict division between what is science and what it isn't. And I'm going to give you a few examples. So we can see this division here. So this is a Google screengrab from 2016 of the word scientist. And we see that scientist here is depicted as a particular type of science-- lab based, chemicals, white, sterile.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Literally white. And it's not until you type in the word indigenous scientists that we see something that is quite ontologically different. It's in the field. There's quite a lot of elders here. It's browner. It's more diverse. But behind it all you sort of think, the science is being done to people.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: If we look at the next screenshot, what we see here is that-- and this is from 2022, this month-- quite a shift. When we look at indigenous science, we can see that there's much more Indigenous agency. It's very feminine. It is now much more into, I would say, the one world world of the laboratory. However there's still this idea that science and myth, as you can see in that sixth image, perhaps they are two halves.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So definitely something's changed in the algorithm to include indigenous people as scientists, as we might say in a one world sense. And it's still leaving open the possibility that science and traditional knowledge can sit together. So this leads me to the last part of this discussion. How do we allow for a pluribus in research infrastructure whereby indigenous worlds and research worlds can co-exist without subsuming each other?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And this is described as a relational ontology. So let's look at what pluribus or research infrastructure looks like, because there's this quotation from Stephanie Russell Carol and others identifies that there's both an abundance of data about indigenous people, but also a scarcity of data that aligns with indigenous peoples' interests and rights.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And I very much acknowledge the work that Stephanie and others of the IAAA-268 working party have undertaken, along with some others whom I'll mention very shortly. So this is a very simplified version of a traditional digital content lifecycle. So, very simple, but most people would recognize this. And underneath all of that infrastructure there's more infrastructure.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And here's all the very helpful elements that can make sense of each of those phases. So how do we somehow cut through all this complexity? So these various technical solutions speak or relate to each other. And clearly this is where the FAIR principles come in to deal with some of that complexity, standardize have a standardized approach. However, there's plenty of research to show that just trying to implement FAIR is a huge task.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: One of the things, though, from an Indigenous perspective is that while these are infrastructures talking to infrastructures, infrastructures talking to infrastructures, where does indigenous rights and responsibilities spin into this? And hint, the response has been the key principles. So when you try to pluraversalize your infrastructure to incorporate indigenous perspectives on the relationships between people and their data, which is either explained as an unbroken responsibility to all things and loop in the world, including how these things are represented in the data.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: How do you do that? So the key principles, which are around collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics-- these are very people principles, very relational. They sit alongside the FAIR principles. So it's be FAIR, but also CARE, which is quite a neat little mnemonic. So what does care look like?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: How do you do care? And again, this is from Stephanie Rousseau Carol and others. Here are some ideas. Practice CARE in collection. Engage CARE in stewardship. Implement CARE in the data community, and use FAIR and CARE in data applications. Now, that all sounds very sensible, and there's some ideas about how you might do that.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: But of course it's a difficult thing. And we're only really at the start of this. So hence there is a IAAA working group to think about these principles. So I've got a pretty simple view of this. And this is what I might call the four P's. So one is around policy. How does that create-- as around power and how power and equity are related.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And who has the power to implement things? So this is not just an indigenous concern. So this screen grab is from a paper from late 2020. But when we're thinking about it from an indigenous perspective it takes a particular form, and that's around indigenous sovereignty and indigenous data governance. So power is the first P. The second P is around policy.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: How do we develop policies? And in New Zealand, we have been looking at national policy. So it's co-design of access to data with tribal collectors. So this has implications for how researchers not only access, but the uses for which data may be used. However, fundamentally it's about giving tribal groups power to make decisions. So it's data for governance, not just governance of data.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: It could also look like people. So we're still in New Zealand. So this is a very, very recent move. At the institutional level, who makes the decisions about fairness and transparency of indigenous data? So it's going to be a person with a discussion with other people. And in this particular job description just closed, their role is to access different research and disciplinary context to implement care.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So these principles, which has begun at a global level, are coming down into the institutional implementation level. So this is a job from Auckland University. Then the last P is around process. And at a global level, it could be indigenous people managing their own digital resources. And so this is the approach of local contexts-- and there was talked about this earlier in the week-- that works with both tribal groups and institutions to recognize indigenous data, sovereignty, and governance.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And this intervention is through these labels, traditional knowledge labels and biocultural labels. And they are appended to a digital resource, whether that resource as a heritage, for example, piece of data, or a biocultural data. And these labels work by creating a space in the metadata to allow for indigenous relationships to the data, whether that's retrospectively to already existing collections or data, or potentially prospectively to a potential re-use, perhaps even a commercial reuse.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And this needs to be recognized. And here we have-- perhaps this is the first actual application of a biocultural label around a genomic sequence-- a genome sequence. So it's very, very new approach. And you can check out a lot of the details by going to the local context website. Or as I said, viewing the talk that happened on Tuesday.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So for me, what this is doing is an ontological relationship. And how that works is that the labels offer intervention points. So here's your traditional life cycle research life cycle. But here, there are some intervention points so that you can focus on things like identification, interpretation, negotiation, education, and connection so that the user, or the collecting institution, can actually have some guided input from the community.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Neither one on the site is subsuming the other, and that's really important. That's a clear reversal approach that is an ontological relationship or infrastructure for a research pluribus. So I'm going to finish with a little bit of speculation. And also, I hope this is a positive note. The fact that NISO has a three year plan around diversity, inclusion, and equity speaks of NISO though wanting to tackle something serious.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Not just ethically, but also in terms of the infrastructure. So I wonder how this positive trajectory translates into what is shaping up to be the next big thing, if we are to believe the media. And I also am reflecting on our opening speaker. The metaverse, which was a topic at the start of the conference. So unsurprisingly, and as this quotation identifies, the metaverse seems pretty much like the one world world.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And this is despite the fact that the actual physical infrastructure, the hardware, often sits alongside or on indigenous lands, and it certainly crosses them. And one of the things that I guess we have seen in relation to land is that currently, digital land is very much hot. And others would say speculative property. And there's a really strong terra nullius feeling about much of the activity that's taking place.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And there's a lot of this idea of conquest or being pioneering-- almost this idea of, anybody can do anything. One feels like it's one's destiny. And that doesn't sit very well with a lot of people. However, it doesn't need to be like that. The metaverse doesn't need to be like that. And this is an example from Minecraft, which is a Minecraft library.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And it's dedicated to journalists who have been censored in their own countries, and the library contains over 200 books containing more than 200 posts and articles. So obviously, if you can build libraries-- and many people have been building libraries in the metaverse, because Zuckerberg did not invent the metaverse. It's a whole system of interrelated ideas. Then this seems to be a positive thing.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And so from an indigenous perspective, we can all already see that our more creative people-- and here's an example of an NFT-- are interested in the potential of the metaverse to enable not just economic opportunities, but to do it in a way that maintains a relationship with community, as this particular NFT indicates. So I guess what I'm suggesting is that the CARE principles are actually very applicable to that which is coming-- collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, and ethics.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And I would commend NISO for allowing voices to be brought forward that can express these, because these are not just ethical ideas. They need to work on both sides. That's what pluriversal infrastructure is all about. So, tena koutou katoa-- many thanks. And I hope these ideas give us something to talk about.
SPEAKER 1: Dana, thank you so much. So much to think about in your talk. Thank you. I particularly loved how you connected Siva's talk with your ideas and your perspective. So many things I'd like to dig into. As you connected the two, I think I was just kind of reflecting on Siva's talk as you were wrapping things up.
SPEAKER 1: And this notion of a terra incognita that we need to conquer. When Siva was talking about the growth imperative in Silicon Valley, one of the things that I didn't get a chance to ask him about was, where do you grow when you have two billion users, or however many billions of users? You have as many people are on the planet.
SPEAKER 1: You can't keep growing at 20% per year. So you create this whole new world that you then conquer. It's like, how do you grow your empire when you control the world? But you can't possibly. It's interesting to think about what's lost in that world if you drive towards a worldview that is all controlled by Zuckerberg and his metaverse.
SPEAKER 1: And I think you spoke very eloquently about the power of that knowledge, and how do we preserve it and keep it, because it is extremely valuable. Interested to think about your view of that research lifecycle and that process of science and communication, and how those things tie together, of creation of knowledge and creation of a space.
SPEAKER 1: And how do we build in more community and more collectivity, and a more world-encompassing view than a handful of smart people in one particular little corner of the world? How can we help foster that growth and kind of avoid the consolidation that's been taking place?
SPEAKER 1:
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Well, I guess what attracts me to the concept, and Escobar's concept of the pluribus works on an older concept. But it has a very specific indigenous perspective to it, and that is the relationship between place and power and all the goods in between that. So I guess in the examples that I've been showing you, these are ways to open up that space.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And some of that is around the people doing things and thinking ideas, and then it is around the technical solutions that enable that to happen. And so local context to me is allowing a space for people to maintain their own worlds. Because we can't keep crashing worlds into the one world. It's not healthy for anybody, and it repeats a very familiar pattern for indigenous people. So I've taken some time to explain that because this is not new.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Indigenous people have experienced this firsthand. We've already seen it. And so we don't need to repeat that. And I think that's what Siva was saying at the beginning. We already know this. We don't need to repeat it. So where are the intervention points? And the research cycle keeping those spaces open where both sides can meet.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: We need the technical solution, and we know that knowledge is floating freely all over the place. But for indigenous people, the digital is still part of the land and the people. Those things all go together. And so there's no divorcing between that. So I guess that's what the key message is-- that we need to be able to maintain our own way of relating to each other and the things where we're physically located in.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And the metaverse goes off as if it somehow doesn't exist. People don't exist in their real bodies in real places with real land, and that's what we keep reminding everybody. You can't keep divorcing those. It isn't just theory. It's real. And I guess that's what we see at the moment-- who gets the goods and the benefits?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: But really want to look at that first biocultural label, because that's genomic data. And that, as we know in our current circumstances, is really important. But who will benefit from all of that? And so what is really great about that as an example is that that's an acknowledgment that down the track-- so this is the [INAUDIBLE] data. Down the track, how do we connect people with that data so that they too might have an opportunity?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: That's not to say that they actually say, where's the commercial application? And we want our 10%. That's not their discussion. It's recognition of people and places with data.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah. The connection of humanity and place really came through in your talk in terms of a division between science and studying the world, as if scientists don't live in the world, or the outputs don't engage the world and engage humans in this process or in the outcomes.
SPEAKER 1: Sort of the frustrating thing that's going on right now in terms of some things taking place in society. Like, whoa. These are processes that we're all engaged in. And it's not as if there's science over here, and it's some machine. Interested to think about-- not there was a question earlier that was posed in the Slack channel-- the back slap channel-- about the creation of indigenous ontologies.
SPEAKER 1: But I'm wondering if-- the creation of ontologies is important, but I'm wondering also, how do we connect those things to bring that indigenous knowledge in the way that it's organized into other spheres? How do we build a bridge between those?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Look, I'm not a data scientist or a librarian. But I do know that this is something that has been worked on certainly in New Zealand, and I do in Canada as well, that work has been undertaken in these areas. So, you know, I can't tell you the exact detail of it, but I do know that it's something that people are thinking about. And that's why I wanted to show you that whakapapa.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: OK, because whakapapa-- and this is where some of the Maoli thinking is-- organizers, relationships, that are not hierarchical in the sense that we might necessarily think. But actually, when I was looking at the presentation just before this one around whoever was showing EBSCO, some of the relationships there also aren't what you might think until you start delving into them, and then they make sense.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So be contextual. And I think for indigenous people, understanding that context make sense of the relationships so that we understand different things. And that's what knowledge is about. It's not that way or that process, that one process. It says, let us maintain our own way of thinking about the world and our relationship with it because it makes sense for us. And perhaps it might make sense for you once you get that.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: If we keep going down this pathway, we know that's not the way to innovation.
SPEAKER 1: Yeah. A lot of the organizational structures of plants, et cetera-- I was listening to a story earlier about Linnaeus and how he organized his botany, and how the assumptions that were built into his assumptions in his world have shaped our entire understanding of classification of plants and fauna, which might work in one context in one corner of the world, but certainly might not on another corner of the world.
SPEAKER 1: And we've unfortunately driven a lot of the classification ontology work from a particular view.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Indeed. And I mentioned James Cook for a reason because he had a botanist on board with him who became the president of the Royal Society. So, Joseph Banks. And he was a great collector, and actually that's the start of Kew Gardens. But Kew Gardens is basically based on indigenous knowledge. You needed to know what you were collecting, and the only people that could tell you was the people that knew about those plants.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So these things have ramifications unto the present day. And so this forgetting, this terra nullius-- I'm using it metaphorically. I guess that legally, it also allowed certain things to hand. But that's terra nullius thinking that can just take what doesn't appear anybody's saying anything about, and fix all sorts of areas. So not only are classifications the systems of today on which we build standards, but also potentially into the future.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So the metaverse is only a potential future. But we could see similar things happening. So that's why standards can actually create other types of connections, because things don't work unless they work together. And so there are points of intervention that can be made if we truly want things not to be the way that we know things have been and have not been about well-being and good for all.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So the common good often is only certain people fit into the common good. And many Indigenous people have not seen the common good.
SPEAKER 1: And in terms of the FAIR and CARE work-- I know this is relatively new. It was 2020, 2021 21 when CARE was first released? In what ways can the community get behind that and support it, and kind of bring it to practical implementation?
SPEAKER 1: Are there any ideas you have there?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Yeah. And I think local context is-- it's so new. It's about a year and a half old to two years. So it's one thing to have the thinking and the principles. It's another thing to see them being implemented. And so what I'm absolutely amazed about here in New Zealand is that there is now somebody at Auckland University whose job is to implement the CARE principles into their research management structures I have no idea what that would look like, but I do know that people will need to be involved.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And of course, when we're talking about artificial intelligence, whatever that may mean-- I've now learnt about it a lot from our alumni this week. But when we're thinking about automation, what are those intervention points? And clearly it's metadata. You know, how can that be picked up in a way that honors CARE? That's not an easy question to even answer.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: But if you start with a person whose job it is who can gather others-- and NISO is a really good example of a group that has set a three year strategy-- then amongst this wider global community, there are certainly people that would be able to chip away at that. And we have a saying here amongst our tribal group of Ngai Tahu, and it's [INAUDIBLE] pounamu.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: And pounamu is jade. But it's New Zealand, jade? OK, and [NON-ENGLISH] means to shine it down, wear it down. Wear it down. Because if you've ever seen jade in the raw, it looks like a big white stone. So it's not until you start shaving it down, shaving it down, that it reveals itself. But this is a time process.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: However, you need to know that this jade [INAUDIBLE] to start off with. So I guess this is how I see it, as well-- that it will take time. But amazingly, it's already started. And it started from a really good place with ideas through local context, through people and institutions, and in our government saying, we take this seriously. And I've even seen a funding application just recently that says, and what's your plan for Indigenous data sovereignty?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: So I guess you can actually do it. But you have to know that you can do it, and you want to do it, and you think it's a good thing, and it's a new ideology.
SPEAKER 1: It's sort of when you're designing a system you think about, what are the foundational principles that you start designing those systems? And if you're thinking about-- say, I'm just going to take a different example. But take preservation. If you start with thinking that, I want this digital object to have a life 50 or 100 years from now, you'll take better design decisions earlier.
SPEAKER 1: And if you're thinking about the cultural context and the principles of cultural recognition, principles of CARE, you'll take better design decisions in your data management practice, in your data collection practice. So I think it might take several years for this new notion to build into practice. But I think it's going to make a lot of difference once it is.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Well, look. I think amongst NISO members there are so many people that are actually already enabling the metaverse. And they know how to do it. And so, it's the builders. I guess I'm reflecting on research where indigenous people knew their spaces, and they were then exploited to mine those spaces because somebody else thought, oh, well we'll get gold, and we can get you to mine it for us, and we'll take all the riches.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: I think we want to reverse that and to say actually, the miners are already here. And I'm not talking about the Bitcoin miners here. I'm talking about people that actually know where the gold is, and then how to use that to benefit more broadly. And I think that's where we want to be. Not to see ourselves as-- and of course, be individuals, but who have a lot of agency to create a future.
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: The metaverse is a potential idea. Mostly it's commercial. Yes, a lot of it's built around gaming. And education is possible, and all those other good things, and maybe libraries. And we know that's all going on. But a lot of it's very commercially based, and it's really about selling and buying stuff. However, the people that enabled it are sitting here in this audience, and they can also contribute to, well actually, maybe we should be thinking about, I wonder, how would an Indigenous person think about this?
KATHARINA RUCKSTUHL: Who should I talk to about this? Actually, do I even have anything there? So I guess there's a lot of, I have full belief an individual agency to create new futures.
SPEAKER 1: Well, I think that is a great place to end this conversation-- enabling great futures and making that future inclusive and understanding, engaging those people in that, is a nice place to end.

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