Governance Ecologies

Beyond Binary Ethics in AI Discourse

Nathan Schneider — Tue, 26 May 2026 16:55:15 +0000

Beyond Binary Ethics in AI Discourse Nathan Schneider Tue, 05/26/2026 - 10:55

Kadallah Burrowes

Over the course of the last semester, the Media Economies Design Lab has been developing a research navigation tool for the Governance Ecologies set of projects with the codename Genly. Genly is in equal parts a tool for navigating this existing research, and an experiment in developing ethical implementations of artificial intelligence.

While developing Genly, we explored self-hosted chat interfaces, local models trained on public domain data, and cloud infrastructure running on green energy, in pursuit of answering the question: how can we build better AI systems? Not better in the sense of "cheaper," more "productive," or with an ever larger feature set, but better for the environment, better for workers, and better for our collective humanity. As we built this tool over the back drop of a campus increasingly vocal in its opposition to the imposition of AI onto students and faculty, our questions became less about how to build better AI tools, and more about if we should be building AI tools at all.

Genly is named after Genly Ai from The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. In the book, Genly is the First Mobile, a representative of the inter-planetary League of All Worlds sent to the planet Gethen to extend an invitation to join the League. Like most protagonists in Le Guin's Hainish Cycle, Genly is not perfect and The League of All Worlds does not represent the saccharine, pollyannaish vision of progress presented by other science fiction properties like Star Trek's United Federation of Planets. Genly is at times uncertain of the mission he's been tasked with, and questions the intentions of the organization that he is charged with representing. And yet, he is an envoy, the first of his kind, representing a possible future in which technological progress is used in service of the advancement of all humankind.

This assistant that we've created has been named after Genly because it too acts as an envoy. It points to the possibility of these tools being used in service of something greater. But it is not made to be a missionary, proselytizing without questioning why things are done the way that they are. Genly represents a middle path for AI development, one in which tools are made to fit form to function, and whose necessity is never taken for granted.

In Part 1 of this post, I will outline the process we went through in the development of Genly in service of building a more ethical AI stack. In Part 2, I will delve into my personal experience developing this tool and the moral calculus I found myself engaging in along the way.

Part 1: Documentation

Genly is an AI assistant primarily built for navigating the various research repositories that make up the Governance Ecologies project. The tool functions as a conversational interface: a researcher interested in these projects asks Genly questions, and it will provide a brief summarized answer while also providing direct links to the actual sources that has compiled answers from. In this way, Genly is designed to act as a reference librarian redirecting those seeking knowledge directly to the source rather than as a source of knowledge itself.

Within Governance Ecologies, there are currently four primary projects:

Governance Archeology is a database of historical communities around the world that engaged in cooperative governance practices.
Protocol Oral History Project is a collection of transcripts of oral history interviews with people that design and implement a wide range of protocols.
Excavations is a collection of art projects reflecting on historical examples of governance enriched with information from and about the artists that created the work.
Protocol Bicorder is a web app for documenting protocols and a repository featuring the protocols documented with the Bicorder.

While the first three of these datasets can be queried via the conversational interface, the integration of the Bicorder is more for the creation of new data to be added to the repository. Rather than the user manually quantifying their protocol along the various axis included in the Bicorder, Genly acts as a kind of interviewer, asking the user questions tailored to the answers they've already provided. Genly then quantifies the responses based on the parameters of the Bicorder and outputs JSON data formatted to be uploaded to the Bicorder database.

So much of trying to build an ethical AI system comes down to explicitly interrogating the composition of the stack that powers the project, and making active choices to uphold specific ethical principles at each layer. Genly's current stack is as follows:

Hostinger VPS - Hosting infrastructure
Cloudron - Collaborative sysadmin interface
Open WebUI - User interface and feature set: RAG, Tools, etc.
GreenPT: Cloud model provider

In testing we also used:

Ollama - Local AI model router
gemma3:1b and llama3.2 - Local AI models

MEDLab hosts a number of services via Cloudron on Hostinger. Cloudron is a very powerful service for people interested in getting into self-hosting that provides user friendly interfaces for many sysadmin related tasks, manages user permissions across different applications, and has robust community support.

We then installed Open WebUI and Ollama on to Cloudron to create the initial interface for development. Open WebUI is what users actually interact with and see when they visit the URL for Genly. It also hosts a wide range of other plug and play features that were particularly crucial for building a research assistant, including native retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) support that acts as a kind of long-term memory bank for the model, and the ability to use custom "tools," Python scripts provided to the LLM that increases its functionality. Ollama is essentially a router that allows people self-hosting AI systems to use local (rather than cloud based) LLM models. We used it with two popular models (gemma and llama) in early testing phases, but eventually phased it out due to their limited capability Ultimately, we opted to use GreenPT's green-r-raw cloud model that is built on OpenAI's GPT-OSS but with inference powered exclusively by renewable energy and with more robust privacy practices.

The process of development has been an ongoing loop of questioning, building, testing, and tweaking. Before we began development, we defined a matrix of ethical considerations that could help guide our decision making process. On one axis, we considered the various layers that combine to create an AI stack modelled loosely on the techno-political framing popularized by Benjamin Bratton, which goes beyond technical and material considerations to think about how these interlocking layers of technology impact and are shaped by our political and economic systems. In our matrix, we thought about training, models, inference, agents, and interfaces. On the other axis, we wanted to consider specific approaches to the question of ethics: the environment, property rights, state violence and control, human development, privacy and security, labor rights, artistic production, fundamental existential threats, and more. Rather than analyzing each layer of the stack from each of these individual perspectives, approaches were analyzed within five overarching domains: social, technology, governance, economic, environmental.

In the process of building, I've mostly used Claude as an assistant in understanding how to alter parameters to get the tool to work effectively, and as a resource for building scripts to work with our datasets. For example, Claude developed the script that pulled and cleaned the oral history transcripts for use in the RAG system, and coded the Open WebUI tool that helps Genly output Bicorder results in a format fit for the existing repository. For each dataset, I have a list of questions that I have used to test Genly to ensure that generated results were accurate and sufficiently helpful. Based on the answers to these test questions, I was able to make adjustments to the RAG inputs, to the models' advanced parameters, or in the decision making process for which model to use at all.

Future Work

Should we continue to develop Genly, there are many routes forward for improvement. First, we need to develop protocols for including the work that exists in the various research repositories within Genly. There are people whose work appears in these collections who have expressed discomfort with AI writ large and would likely object to their information being used in an AI system, even if only used locally or with models with zero data retention policies in place, and I believe we need their explicit consent before moving much further and certainly before these tools are available to the public. Luckily, the way the RAG system works, it will be easy to remove disputed content and re-add it if that permission is granted without breaking the underlying function of Genly.

Second, though related to the first, we should turn my process for testing the accuracy of Genly into an open tool that makes it easier for the public to audit how the tool is functioning. This is particularly important for seeking permission from the people whose work is represented within the collections so that they can independently verify if their work is being accurately represented.

Third, as of now, the Open WebUI RAG system is quite limited in terms of its ability to query and synthesize results from across multiple data sets at once. Right now, people can ask questions about a single set, but if they wanted to ask about connections or patterns across research collections, hallucinations begin to appear and obvious answers are lost in the large amount of information it is searching through. As such, one possible solution is to develop a more custom Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based approach that assigns individual "research agents" to each data set and has an orchestrating agent that retrieves and puts this information in conversation across these various agents. If this MCP work is undertaken, then a new user interface will necessarily need to be developed, ideally that can be embedded directly into the Governance Ecologies website.

Part 2: Reflection

The development of Genly has taken place within a cultural moment in which people are increasingly critical of the development of artificial intelligence. Here at CU, there has been a massive push back from students and faculty alike against a multi-million dollar deal with Open AI, and within the Front Range at large there is active organizing against bills designed to encourage data centers to be built in Colorado, and projects like Denver Against Machines and Deflock (developed by a Boulder resident) are doing everything in their power to halt the adoption of automated license plate readers (ALPRs) by police departments across the country. What we are seeing is a movement populated by a broad coalition of organizers, academics, tech workers, and other citizens from all walks of life that are opposed to artificial intelligence, the mechanisms required to make these systems function, and the various implementations of the technology. While there are theoretically various methods possible for opposing AI, what I've seen embodied by the formation of a multi-issue coalition is an increasing trend towards outright AI refusal, an opposition that I have never seen resonate so widely with such a broad swath of people with other types of technology. Developing in this context, Genly was created as a thought experiment to think through the question of if ethical AI systems are even possible from the standpoint of actively building in order to understand practically how things function and what constraints are theoretical versus inherent to the technology itself.

AI is not good.

I must admit, I have been hesitant to develop Genly from the very beginning. I have been involved with various organizations participating in the aforementioned anti-AI coalition building since before Genly was conceptualized and I found myself in a moral bind when asked to embark on this journey. The artificial intelligence industry has been criticized for contributing to climate change, stealing the intellectual property of artists and internet users for training, the disenfranchisement of workers, enabling mass surveillance and genocide, harming users' cognitive function, and more. Even if we as developers of Genly are able to develop AI tools that are able to meaningfully address each of these critiques within our individual stack (such as by using local models trained on public domain data, using renewable energy, and so forth), the development of Genly required me to use Claude in the process in such a way that still contributes to all of the negative costs associated with artificial intelligence. And, this hypothetical scenario is not actually the current state of affairs with Genly: the underlying model behind green-r-raw was developed by OpenAI, and thus likely trained using stolen IP and dirty energy.

Further, the primary function that Genly was created to fulfill, serving as a "research assistant" in and of itself threatens a kind of epistemicide. If a person is using Genly, they are placing an intermediary between themselves and the research itself. This agent is designed to direct users to original sources rather than output contextless information, but even with these guardrails in place, users are getting a kind of "pre-digested" output, filtered by a machine embedded with all of the biases of its training data and limited by a RAG system that cannot search across all of the input knowledge sources at once, ultimately leading to incomplete outputs. While this is obvious to me as the developer of Genly, it may not be obvious to its users, which can lead to a false sense of security and belief in the fidelity of the information that has been served.

Research is not a mechanical process of simply retrieving information, it is a ritual of discovery in which the researcher builds knowledge and forms conclusions through active engagement with source materials. At its core, Genly obstructs this process whenever it is being used, and obfuscates this larger truth about what research is and entails by merely existing. By calling Genly a research assistant, we risk reducing research to a mechanical function in which the output is more important than the transformative process that occurs when a person seeks understanding.

AI is not bad.

Still, most of the problems people have with artificial intelligence are not truly inherent to the technology itself, but are the results of implementations developed by people with abhorrent ethics. AI systems developed out of a logic of limitless economic growth by dragons primarily concerned with sleeping on the biggest piles of gold and data are going to treat ecological and social costs as necessary evils, or in the case of how AI is used to threaten and discipline workers, as an explicitly desirable outcome.

But virtually every concern that people have about AI has researchers actively working towards creating alternatives for in some form or another. Concerned about the ecological impacts of inference? GreenPT relies exclusively on renewable energy and uses system level prompts to reduce token usage and decrease ecological impacts even further. Worried about unethical data labelling practices that exploit workers? DAIR is developing frameworks for ethical data work based on real relationships with workers. Critical of the use of stolen intellectual property to train AI? The KL3M Data Project is a collection of training resources for large language models built around government documents, public domain works, and other legally permissible sources. Wary of the mass centralization of our data by a few corporations? Local models and cloud services with zero data retention policies keep your data on your own machine.

To the average person, a lot of technology is indiscernible from magic. You tap on the black glass and suddenly you're seeing and talking with your parent on the other side of the world, or communicating with the person in front of you despite not sharing a language. Artificial intelligence feels more like magic than any other technology that I've ever encountered. It has the power to make our lives much easier, enable ways of being unimaginable to us even now, offers new ways of tackling old problems. But in order to bring about positive outcomes, we have to be willing to build towards them. In this sense, AI refusal is a performance of purity. It is easy to disengage from a technology you are not already using, and the refusal by such a person will do nothing to stop the advancement of it by the people who are building it for explicitly evil purposes with no regard for consequence. Much harder than refusal is to attempt to build a better way despite the bad paths that people default to now because they believe no better way is possible.

The secondary use of Genly as a conversational interface for the Bicorder strikes me as a good use of AI. Not only does the conversational interface feel more intuitive than placing numbers on a scale, I believe the process of thinking through and answering questions that are responsive to one's replies positively impacts the person using the tool in a way that using it as a "research assistant" does not. This process requires self-reflection in a way that embeds knowledge further in a user's mind and generates an output that contributes to a knowledge commons.

AI is not neutral.

While creating Genly, I thought a lot about the article "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" by Langdon Winner. In it, he argues that we should make distinctions between technologies that have politics inherent in them versus those that simply enable and are more accessible when specific politics are at play. The most obvious example of a technology that has a particular politic embedded in it is the nuclear bomb. It cannot be used for anything other than mass death, its production requires the use of materials that have terrible implications for public health, and they necessarily require a level of authoritarianism in their management to ensure they don't end up in the hands of a producer's adversaries. Many conversations about AI refusal treat artificial intelligence like the nuclear bomb, inherently saddled with anti-human, centralizationist politics.

As discussed above, I don't believe this comparison to be true. Everyday, people are developing AI that attempts to chart a high road path directly countering the unethical implementations that have become all too common. To give into the idea that all use cases are evil regardless of context is in and of itself a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, it cedes those technologies to those who would use them for evil.

Based on the development of Genly, what I find more useful than trying to define AI as either inherently good or bad is to think about specific implementations within both their individual context and a coherent moral code. In this way, some of the most important work to come out of this project was the ethical matrix discussed in Part 1, which provides a place to start when contemplating the use or development of specific tools. I believe that by disentangling different ethical domains from one another, and viewing this technology as a stack of discrete parts that are wired together, we can begin the hard work of righting specific wrongs rather than the impossible work of enforcing an all-encompassing, contextless ethical standard.

It is becoming increasingly impossible for people to opt-out of AI in their day to day lives. So it is more important than ever, if for no other reason than for our own mental well-being that we start to understand our choices as more nuanced than "to use" or "to refuse."

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Listening to the Land and Its People: Youth, Smartphones, and Seeds in Brazil's Amazon and Cerrado

Nathan Schneider — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:31:24 +0000

Listening to the Land and Its People: Youth, Smartphones, and Seeds in Brazil's Amazon and Cerrado Nathan Schneider Mon, 03/23/2026 - 16:31

Lia Rezende Domingues

Young Communicators from the Xingu Seed Network record interviews for a documentary about the organization. Photo: Are Yudja/MJTIX

It was the season of fire in São Félix do Araguaia—a small, revolutionary town in the heart of Brazil, on the banks of the Araguaia River, one of the country's largest. Here, the Cerrado—Brazil's savanna—transforms into what locals call the Cerradão, a denser woodland announcing the approach of the vast Amazon rainforest.

Every year, the areas surrounding the Araguaia River burn. But in 2024, the fires were far worse than usual. The smoke changed the color of the sky and the sun. The ground, usually a deep red, turned gray. This combination weighed heavily on the hearts and minds of those who dream and work for a better future.

It was right in the middle of all this that a good seed was born: the Young Communicators of the Xingu Seed Network (XSN) project.

When the smartphone becomes a seed

Ryweakatu Kayabi takes photos of seed collectors at the Xingu Seed Network Gathering in São Félix do Araguaia: although she wasn't one of the young people who took part in the project, it was scenes like this that inspired its creation. Photo: Bianca Moreno/RSX

It began with a desire to listen to the land—or, the "territory," as we often say in the Brazilian socio-environmental field. For us, territory is a word that speaks both of the physical land and the web of relationships that cross it. It's a broader concept, embracing the geographic space, its politics, and its ecological community.

Then, the idea then grew into a desire to listen to the territory's youth. After all, we were in São Félix do Araguaia for the 3rd Youth Gathering of the Xingu Seed Network. There, I couldn't help but notice the smartphones constantly in the hands of the young people during all the activities. They were taking photos, shooting videos, and posting on social media.

In contrast, friends who work with photo and video in São Paulo—something like the Brazilian New York, nearly 2,000 km from the interior where we were—had been hired by me to do the same kind of work, but officially.

In the midst of it all, my eyes stinging from the smoke, I asked myself: "Why am I bringing people from so far away to do something that the youth here are already doing spontaneously?"

“Where we stand”: A small explanation of something very significant

Some seed collectors of the Xingu Seed Network: in total, there are over 700 people, including Indigenous people from six ethnic groups and family farmers from 15 settlements in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Diversity is certainly a key word for this work. Photo: Bianca Moreno/RSX

In Brazil, racial and identity debates have gained significant momentum in recent years. Today, in the field of communications, the concept of "where we stand" (originally lugar de fala in Portuguese, and often translated as “speaking place”, "social location", “positionality” or “standpoint epistemology”) is frequently discussed. This concept was brilliantly elucidated in the book of the same name by renowned researcher Djamila Ribeiro—who, incidentally, is one of the key figures fostering the publication of important voices from the Black and feminist movements in Brazil.

As the Communications Coordinator for the Xingu Seed Network (XSN)—and as someone who was not born or raised in the territories where XSN works—creating a communication strategy that gives genuine voice to those who actually live here, and who occupy a different "social location" than my own, is certainly one of my priorities.

"What if we created a network of young communicators within the Xingu Seed Network?" I thought, amidst the chaos of the fires.

Young Communicators of the Xingu Seed Network

From left to right, top to bottom: the young communicators Edimara Silva, Tariakatu Kayabi, Olinda Xavante, Kudayawa Juruna, Marewi Juruna, Mirella Marino, Itseitchumã Waura, and the project coordinator, Lia Domingues. Photo: XSN Archive

It's interesting to see how some things simply flow with ease in life—as they say around here: "If it's meant to be, it will be." Over the following months, I slowly gathered pieces and had the good fortune to find the nutrients I needed to nurture this new project, still just a seed in my heart.

In a happy coincidence, the Xingu Seed Network received a couple of donations that allowed everything to sprout. It wasn't a large amount, but it was enough to select seven young people connected to seed collection to participate in the first phase of the XSN Young Communicators project.

The project officially lasted six months—from June to November 2025. During this time, these seven young people received smartphones, monthly stipends, and two training sessions in Community Communication and Audiovisual Production.

Exchanges: The best way to engage youth

The 1st XSN Young Communicators Training, when we visited the Wayuri Network in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the far north of the Brazilian Amazon. Photo: XSN Archive

Most of the young communicators selected had never traveled more than 400 km from their place of origin. They had never been on an airplane, an elevator, or an escalator. And suddenly, there we were, heading to São Gabriel da Cachoeira, the most indigenous town of the Brazilian Amazon—on the triple border between Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela—for our first activity: an exchange with the Wayuri Network of Indigenous Young Communicators, one of the biggest references in Community Communication in the country.

Working with youth has shown me that exchanges and knowledge-sharing are the best possible format. And there's nothing like learning from those who already know: during the Covid-19 pandemic, the work of the Wayuri network literally saved lives. Over a week with them, we learned basic communication concepts, structured our program—and, of course, became friends.

During those days, it was agreed and understood that videos and social media were the type of production that most interested the young people of the Xingu Seed Network. And it was arranged that we would produce some individual videos for social media and a collective documentary as the final deliverables for our project.

So, over the following months, our Young Communicators participated in and collaborated on the coverage of three internal XSN events. We held a second training session focused on structuring a script for the documentary we would record together and began capturing the interviews that would be part of it.

Today, nearly nine months later, the results of this great sowing continue to thrive: the documentary is in the editing process, and while we don't yet have resources to fund other phases of the project, we are integrating this experience to calmly and consistently formulate the next steps for this fertile and flourishing garden.

Results and learnings

Young communicators Tariakatu, Itseitchumã, and Mirella interview technician Claudia Araujo for the project's documentary. Photo: Lia Domingues/XSN

What we did

Two Communication Trainings
One Video Newsletter
One documentary (currently in editing)
+50 content pieces available on YouTube and Instagram

What we learned

Youth are ready—and super excited!—to communicate: what they lack is guidance and support to know how to channel all that creative energy.
Communication done with the youth of the territories increases our institutional reach within communities: people there love to see what they have produced.
Working with young people from such an extensive and distant territory is expensive and can be quite challenging.
For better results, we need more in-person moments (which also means larger budgets) and continuous, consistent support over time: six months is really just enough time to put the seed in the ground and break its dormancy.
The voice of the youth does not invalidate the voice of people coming from outside—like my friends from São Paulo. In the end, I need both communication formats—one more formal, the other more community-based—to achieve my institutional goals.

About the author

Lia Domingues is a journalist, writer, and traveler. Since 2023, she has coordinated Communications for the Rede de Sementes do Xingu, the leading community-based seed collection network for ecological restoration in Brazil. Additionally, Lia is an Ambassador for the International Network for Seed-based Restoration and a community fellow at MEDLab at the �鶹��Ѱ��.

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When Belém Became the Capital of the World—and Governance Became Our Biggest Challenge

Nathan Schneider — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 17:28:37 +0000

When Belém Became the Capital of the World—and Governance Became Our Biggest Challenge Nathan Schneider Mon, 12/08/2025 - 10:28

Lia Rezende Domingues

Sunset at Estação das Docas, where Belém meets the Guamá River: the city’s waterfront was renovated to host the event. PHOTO: Lia Domingues/RSX

Children and a seed muvuca during an agroecology collective action we joined at Irmã Dorothy Stang Square, named after the activist who was murdered in Pará in 2005. PHOTO: Lia Domingues/RSX

Some of the people involved with community seed-collecting networks in Brazil: governance is both a challenge—and a strength—in our sector. PHOTO: Lia Domingues/RSX

We quickly realized that the best way to capture people’s attention in a space as full of stimuli as COP30 was to place a seed in their hands. PHOTO: Lia Domingues/RSX

A roundtable on ecological restoration in Brazil, held at Casa Belterra, brought together community seed-collecting networks, nursery growers, investors, auditors, and a select group of people in one of the most productive conversations I took part in. PHOTO: Lia Domingues/RSX

In Belém, simply breathing was enough to feel good: the same warmth found in the streets—in every sense—warmed the hearts of those who opened themselves to receive what the city had to offer. PHOTO: Lia Domingues/RSX

May good seeds be planted. PHOTO: Lia Domingues/RSX

Seed collectors share their life stories and answer questions from the audience in one of the presentations held throughout COP30: here, we are in the Green Zone, at the pavilion of the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples. PHOTO: Lia Domingues/RSX

For the first time, the United Nations Conference of the Parties—COP30—was held in the Amazon. For the first time, it was held in Brazil. And, to the surprise of many, it was held in Belém: the capital of Pará, one of the largest states in Brazil and the one with the highest number of murders of grassroots leaders fighting for land rights.

For two weeks in November, 2025, part of the world turned its eyes to Belém, hoping that new commitments for the planet’s climate salvation would be made.

Unfortunately, the “Roadmap”—a kind of collective strategy for transitioning away from fossil fuels, and one of the biggest promises of COP30, the “implementation COP”—did not materialize.

There was simply no consensus among countries—and, as a result, something unexpected unfolded: Colombia proposed a parallel meeting for April 2026, in the Santa Marta mountains, in a bold attempt to move forward with the design of this roadmap outside the official United Nations space.

As the communications coordinator of the Xingu Seed Network, I went to COP30 to participate in and follow agendas related to ecological restoration. I had the privilege of moving through a diversity of spaces—from the most restricted ones, such as the Blue Zone and some private houses of civil society organizations, to the more open ones, such as the Green Zone, and the most popular spaces, such as Aldeia COP and Cúpula dos Povos.

These are the lessons I learned during those days.

Working in networks is the best strategy: the bigger our muvuca, the more powerful it becomes. Bringing sectors closer and together is still the most important strategy if we want to increase our impact, reach, capacity for action, and ability to collaborate.
Governance is a universal challenge: from community collectives to global coalitions, finding ways for large groups of people to function together remains one of humanity’s biggest challenges—just look at the obstacles in major international negotiations and, who knows, even within our own organizations.
Seeds are an ancestral means of communication: in our events, placing seeds in people’s hands made all the difference—suddenly, with seeds in their palms, everyone softened, childhood memories resurfaced, curiosities appeared, and something shifted. People begin to speak naturally when they receive seeds because these grains of life communicate with them. Seeds are affection, heritage, ancestry, future, power, potential, enchantment.
Restoration in Brazil still has a long road ahead: although we are a global reference in ecological restoration, we remain far from reaching the goal of restoring 12 million hectares. From what I’ve observed, seed networks and seedling nurseries are ready to meet a demand much larger than the current one—in an intimate roundtable with key actors in this sector, I learned that we all operate at only 60% of our delivery potential. This clearly means we have a future of much work (and, perhaps, many opportunities) ahead.
Brazil is incredible—and Belém is even more incredible: except for the German chancellor, everyone loved being in Belém. Just stepping into the streets, looking at people, and opening your senses to everything the city had to offer was enough. Food, warmth, kindness, joy, diversity: wow, Belém delivers everything!!! There’s nothing better than leaving a negotiation room, a presentation, or a networking space and stepping straight into a carimbó dance with a bowl of tacacá.
The COP belongs to the “big players,” but this time it was a people’s COP—and there is great power in that: beyond what may or may not be decided at the highest levels, Belém became a stage for a diversity of community leaders and social movements. This warms the heart of those who are fighting on the frontlines—keeping activists motivated and optimistic is essential for us to remain defenders of the future, of the forest, of life.

All that said, it was truly beautiful to see seed collectors — women and men — taking the stage, sharing their stories, receiving standing ovations, and moving audiences to tears. In that sense, for us — community seed-collecting networks in Brazil — COP30 was also a great school, preparing our seeds and seed keepers for the world, for the stage, and for decision-making spaces.

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A Seed Like You’ve Never Seen Before

Nathan Schneider — Tue, 04 Nov 2025 17:04:07 +0000

A Seed Like You’ve Never Seen Before Nathan Schneider Tue, 11/04/2025 - 10:04

Lia Rezende Domingues

Different members of the Network came together for its 15th anniversary, held in 2022 in the Xingu Indigenous Land. PHOTO: Erick Vesch/ISA/Cama Leão

The Xingu River is one of the largest rivers in Brazil—and the main waterway of the iconic Xingu Indigenous Land. PHOTO: Erik Vesch / ISA / Cama Leão

PHOTO: Lia Rezende Domingues

It was sunny when I first walked into the �鶹��Ѱ��. I had come from far away—from Brazil’s heartlands—to share what a community-based native seed collection network looks like in my country.

The story I brought wasn’t mine alone. I was speaking on behalf of many, because the Xingu Seed Network (Rede de Sementes do Xingu) is, above all, the result of a collective, creative, and diverse effort. So I began by asking for permission.

The students listened as I did something I deeply enjoy: sharing solutions for a challenging world.

The Xingu Seed Network

The Xingu Seed Network is the largest and most diverse community-based native seed collection network in Brazil. In a nutshell, the organization brings together more than 700 people who collect over 35 tons of native seeds from 130 native species every year.

These seeds are destined for ecological restoration — collecting and selling them is the beating heart of the Network’s work. And, it’s important to say, these same seeds are gathered by many and diverse hands: 68% of the collectors are Indigenous, 26% are family farmers, and 6% are urban seed gatherers.

To make that happen, an intricate governance structure has been built over the years through experience — through both mistakes and successes — and through shared knowledge that allowed local communities, technicians, researchers, landowners, and companies to come together around a single element: the seed.

First, the beginning: when roots are made of water

The Xingu Seed Network is a non-profit organization that has been operating in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil, since 2007.

It was born out of an interinstitutional campaign led by the Socio-Environmental Institute (Instituto Socioambiental – ISA), as a response to an Indigenous call to care for the Xingu River, one of the major rivers in the region where the Network operates.

To care for the river, it was decided that we should replant its margins and headwaters. And to plant, we would need seeds. That’s how it all began: 18 years ago, the first ten collectors — who would later form the largest community-based seed network in Brazil — delivered 5 tons of seeds.

Since then, these seeds have germinated, grown, and become forests — literally. Throughout its journey, the Xingu Seed Network has already commercialized over 390 tons of seeds, enabling the restoration of nearly 11,000 hectares and generating more than 1.8 million USD in income for the seed collectors.

Today, the Xingu Seed Network is the largest among the networks that make up Redário, a national articulation of community-based native seed collection networks across Brazil.

Then, continuity: an invitation to know more

Over the next few months, we will share more about this deeply inspiring experience of the Xingu Seed Network. Topics such as governance, women, and youth will be explored in future posts. Stay tuned to learn more.

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Seeds of Democracy: Learning from the Xingu Network

Nathan Schneider — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 18:02:12 +0000

Seeds of Democracy: Learning from the Xingu Network Nathan Schneider Thu, 09/04/2025 - 12:02

October 8, 2025
4 p.m. Mountain Time
CASE E330

What if the most effective conservation isn't happening in boardrooms or government offices, but in the hands of Indigenous women collecting seeds along Brazilian riverbanks?

Join us October 8th at 4 PM in CASE E330 as the Media Economies Design Lab welcomes Lia Rezende Domingues from the Xingu Seed Network—a remarkable organization that's proving democracy and environmental restoration go hand in hand.

Beyond Top-Down Conservation

The Xingu Seed Network isn't your typical environmental organization. Born from the grassroots in 2007, this Brazilian collective has grown into a 700-member network where Indigenous peoples, family farmers, and urban communities work together to heal degraded Amazon and Cerrado landscapes. Their secret? Participatory governance that puts decision-making power directly in the hands of those doing the work.

Through their General Assembly—where every member holds equal voting rights—they've created a self-governing system that has:

Restored over 10,800 hectares of degraded land
Collected 220+ native seed species
Generated nearly R$8.5 million in income for collectors (80% women)
Built a transparent governance model documented in their "Collector's Book"

Why This Matters for Governance Ecologies

This event connects directly to MEDLab's Governance Ecologies project, which is building a global repository of diverse governance practices. The Xingu Network represents a powerful example of how traditional ecological knowledge can be integrated with democratic organizational structures to create both environmental and social transformation.

Their approach challenges conventional conservation models by demonstrating that effective ecosystem restoration emerges not from external management, but from empowering communities to govern themselves while working in respectful relationship with their territories.

Join the Conversation

Come discover how seed collection became a vehicle for community empowerment, and how participatory governance can heal both landscapes and social structures. Lia will share insights from the field about building democratic systems that actually work—one seed, one vote, one restored hectare at a time..

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Indigenous Governance and Tomorrow's Democracy: Join the Conversation

Anonymous — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 18:48:55 +0000

Indigenous Governance and Tomorrow's Democracy: Join the Conversation Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 07/28/2025 - 12:48

Júlia Martins Rodrigues

Every Friday, August 1-29, 2025
8 a.m. MT (11 a.m. BRT)
Trilingual format with simultaneous interpretation in English, Portuguese, and Spanish

Join us for Friday Dialogues: Listening as Governance—a multilingual journey into community-led governance that bridges continents and cultures, and an opportunity to meet representatives from Indigenous communities worldwide.

What if the solutions to our most pressing democratic challenges have been practiced for millennia, waiting in the collective memory of Indigenous and traditional communities worldwide? What if the path toward more equitable, sustainable governance isn't forward but inward—toward the ancestral wisdom that has sustained communities through countless generations?

This August, Meli Bees Network and the Media Economies Design Lab (MEDLab) are launching an exciting initiative to change this narrative. The Community Governance IdeaLAB creates space for Indigenous leaders, researchers, and allies to share their governance practices in their own voices, on their own terms.

The Forgotten Foundation of Democracy

Across Latin America, Africa, and Asia, Indigenous and traditional communities have developed sophisticated systems of collective governance that prioritize cooperation over competition, reciprocity over extraction, and mutualism over individualism. These aren't relics of the past—they're living, breathing models of democracy that continue to guide communities in managing their territories, preserving their cultural heritage, and protecting their environments.

Yet these governance models remain largely invisible in mainstream discourse, overshadowed by predominant North Atlantic systems that have historically erased or diminished Indigenous ways of knowing and organizing. The result? A global governance crisis that could benefit tremendously from the very solutions these communities have been perfecting for generations.

A Global Network Takes Action

At the heart of this initiative are the Friday Dialogues: Listening as Governance—a trilingual series that transforms Meli's weekly community calls into intercultural exchanges spanning three continents. Every Friday in August, participants will gather with simultaneous interpretation in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, creating a truly multilingual commons for sharing governance wisdom.

The knowledge shared in these sessions will lay the groundwork for future co-authorship opportunities, policy influence, and collaborative prototyping of what organizers call "pluriversal governance tools"—technologies and frameworks that honor diverse ways of organizing collective life. As democratic institutions worldwide face unprecedented challenges, the governance models of Indigenous and traditional communities offer proven alternatives rooted in principles of care, autonomy, and reciprocity. Their territorial self-management practices demonstrate that another world is not only possible—it's already being lived.

Join the Conversation

Whether you're a community leader, researcher, ally, or simply someone curious about alternative pathways to collective governance, the Friday Dialogues offer a unique opportunity to engage with governance wisdom. The Community Governance IdeaLAB recognizes that the solutions to our democratic challenges may not lie in innovation but in remembering—in honoring the governance models that have sustained communities through colonization, globalization, and climate change. By creating space for these voices to be heard, amplified, and shared, we're not documenting the past. We're building the future.

Hosted by Meli Bees Network gUG, in partnership with MEDLab. Photo courtesy of Meli Bees Network.

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Reimagining Digital Governance: MEDLab at the Governance Futures Network Convening in Bogotá

Nathan Schneider — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 18:07:17 +0000

Reimagining Digital Governance: MEDLab at the Governance Futures Network Convening in Bogotá Nathan Schneider Mon, 06/30/2025 - 12:07

Júlia Martins Rodrigues

What if we radically reimagine our future? The trends are clear: VC-driven business models perpetuate endless cycles of investment and reinvestment for maximum returns, rampant inequality, market consolidation, a handful of platform monopolists steamrolling towards digital totalitarianism. But another way is possible—and it starts with exercising our radical imagination to ignite alternative paths ahead.

Thinking about new tech futures, I recently joined the Governance Futures Network's annual convening in Bogotá, Colombia (June 9-12, 2025) to explore how democratic ownership and governance models can transform our digital lives. The Colombian colorful context proved particularly rich for this conversation, offering examples of community-led governance innovations, such as bioregional governance and peace processes, that emerge from contexts of conflict and transformation—lessons highly relevant for navigating the disruptions facing digital spaces today.

The Governance Futures Network focuses on connecting people, ideas, and initiatives to promote innovative approaches to governance. This international working group brings together people from diverse professional and cultural backgrounds with a shared vision: building "a world where people and planet flourish by transforming how we collectively steward our interdependent well-being, now and into the future."

During the three-day convening, we engaged in "greenhouse" working groups—incubators for emerging governance innovations. As the associate director of MEDLab, it was my pleasure to join the pro-social media governance greenhouse discussions, centered on a critical question: How can we shift from probable futures following current trends toward possible futures that disrupt those trends in favor of more democratic internet governance? The greenhouse sessions employed a methodology of radical imagination, contrasting likely scenarios based on existing trajectories with transformative alternatives that could fundamentally reshape digital power structures. This approach allowed our group to envision concrete pathways toward more equitable online ecosystems.

We brainstormed key infrastructure elements needed to enable alternative digital futures: shared ownership models that distribute both control and value among community stakeholders; alternative enterprise models that prioritize social and environmental impact alongside financial sustainability; a new financial architecture to support democratic digital projects without requiring them to sacrifice their values or governance models to access capital; and alternative exit options that don't rely on acquisition by tech giants or public offerings that prioritize shareholder returns over community benefit.

The Bogotá convening emphasized the interconnected nature of current governance challenges, from bioregional stewardship to intergenerational decision-making to citizen engagement. For MEDLab's work in digital governance, these connections emphasized how online democratic innovations can learn from and contribute to broader movements for participatory governance.

The future of internet governance remains an open question—and gatherings like the one in Bogotá show us how working together is fundamental to start building new futures shaped by democratic participation rather than greed and algorithmic extraction.

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From Governance Archaeology to Governance Ecologies

Nathan Schneider — Mon, 05 May 2025 04:13:57 +0000

From Governance Archaeology to Governance Ecologies Nathan Schneider Sun, 05/04/2025 - 22:13

Júlia Martins Rodrigues

In democratic societies, the power of governing belongs to the people. The extent of this power and processes underlying self-governance, however, widely vary from place to place, from culture to culture, manifesting as dynamic and multidimensional. In North-Atlantic systems, liberal democracies combine principles of individual rights and civil liberties that allow individuals to participate in governance by casting votes for representatives in a multi-tier governmental structure—which stands as one among many within the broader constellation of governance strategies. Collective governance has happened in many forms throughout history and around the world today. In our workplaces, in cyberspace, and in any other social setting, there are implicit or explicit protocols that organize how decisions are made, who is responsible for them, and how accountability is maintained. Assuming we want to practice democracy across different spheres of life, where can we turn for inspiration to develop governance systems for both the present and the future?

In 2021, we began gathering data from historical communities compiling hundreds of communities, institutions, mechanisms, and cultural values in a database we called “Governance Archaeology.” In the same year, we hosted "Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet," an online exhibition bringing together international artists to reimagine internet governance through the lens of historical self-governance practices, exploring indigenous practices, intersectionality, and media archaeology. Displayed at the 2021 UN Internet Governance Forum in Poland, the exhibition created dialogue between multimedia artists and policy spaces, centering underrepresented voices to envision more inclusive internet governance. A couple of years later, the Governance Archaeology project produced its first academic publication, "Governance Archaeology: Research as Ancestry," co-authored by Nathan Schneider and Federica Carugati in Daedalus. The paper presented preliminary insights about designing more moral political economies at different scales.

Over time, we realized that parts of the world, especially the Global South, were underrepresented in our research, though there is much to learn from contemporary communities that have mastered collective governance in diverse contexts. Inspired by groundbreaking anthropological research on how Indigenous peoples of the Americas influenced the development of equality, liberty, and solidarity values, we recognized the need to expand our approach and reframe the project to include a broader range of living communities. Therefore, the Media Economies Design Lab at the �鶹��Ѱ��, in partnership with King's College London, is evolving the framework into "Governance Ecologies," broadening the repository of governance practices to include contemporary groups. The goal of Governance Ecologies is to enrich our governance repertoire beyond contemporary North-Atlantic political traditions, creating a diverse, global commons of collective governance practices across different historical periods and geographies. We seek to grow our understanding of the tools available for self-governance and how communities organize themselves to achieve shared goals.

Visit the new governance.ecologies.info website

The project's architecture is framed under three domains: sources, repositories, and interfaces. Sources include archival and secondary sources, multimedia, and oral histories collection through partnership building. These sources feed two main repositories: the Governance Archaeology database, compiling governance practices from historical communities—which are mainly cataloged by partner researchers affiliated with King's College London under Professor Federica Carugati's leadership; and the repository for contemporary communities, gathering governance traditions from existing groups (especially indigenous and small local communities), member-governed firms, and decentralized peer or user-managed digital communities—the latter primarily carried by MEDLab. Finally, expected outcomes or "interfaces" include (but are not limited to) projects such as a rethinking of governance in cooperative business and MEDLab’s platform experiments such as CommunityRule and a new effort to support protocols for disputes.

Next, we're building bridges with institutional partners and community leaders across South America to learn about their governance journeys. These conversations are creating a rich dialogue about how communities can take control of their own futures. We'd love to connect with more universities, civil society groups, nonprofits, and community organizers to join Governance Ecologies and share their unique stories. Our vision extends beyond South America—we hope to soon include voices from Africa and Asia, enriching our understanding with diverse cultural perspectives and geographical contexts.

If you are interested in learning more about Governance Ecologies and explore potential collaborations, reach out to me at julia.mr@colorado.edu.

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The Protocol Oral History Project

Nathan Schneider — Sun, 04 May 2025 20:41:26 +0000

The Protocol Oral History Project Nathan Schneider Sun, 05/04/2025 - 14:41

Nathan Schneider

The Protocol Oral History Project is an ongoing effort in MEDLab to explore the possibilities of protocols in diverse areas of human self-governance. We have just published the first ten interviews, which range from a Bangladeshi diplomat to a Denver-based healer, with much in between. We will continue adding more interviews in the coming months.

The project description is as follows:

The Protocol Oral History Project is an effort to honor and share the stories of protocol artists—the skilled builders and stewards of the rules, standards, and norms that shape our lives in often invisible ways, ranging from technical standards and diplomatic practices to Indigenous traditions and radical subcultures.

The website was designed by MEDLab's longtime collaborator Drew Hornbein. The color-scheme and grid design was inspired by Constitutional Wampum by Robert Houle, which in turn draws on the use of wampum belts as a form of governance in the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and other Native American cultures. Hornbein designed a protocol to translate strings of text into patterns. You can try it yourself on the website's About page.

These oral histories are part of the broader Governance Ecologies project, for which we have also just published a new website. As part of Governance Ecologies, we hope it will contribute to knowledge of repertoires for self-governance from across time and around the world, so as to inform governance designs for the future.

Visit protocol.ecologies.info

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