About

Development of the Indigenous Server was done on the lands historically occupied by the Muwekma Ohlone People in the Bay Area, California.

The Indigenous Server was started in 2023 by me, Sufyan Abbasi (a non-indigenous PoC), as an action project as part of the final project for a philosophy of ecology course by Nathan Dufour.

I'm a long-time Googler who works on the Earth Engine Team and was deeply inspired by the Indigenous People who present their incredible work at the Geo For Good summits, using maps to define territory and analytics tools for monitoring climate change on their lands. During the closing remarks of the Geo For Good Summit in 2023, during an open-mic forum, an Indigenous Person from the Māori tribe, Lilliana, asked the director, Rebecca Moore, whether Google could provide a dedicated server for Indigenous People's projects, an Indigenous Server. I was deeply inspired by this. I thought, "I could build this!"

During the conference, Googlers typically held office hours to provide technical help on projects. Lilliana came to my office hours to ask a question about how to add a new feature on a website that they were building to track water rights in New Zealand. This format of providing help spoke to me because, as a technical people, I love debugging and solving problems, especially ones that have significant, positive environmental and social impact. In the short term, I want to volunteer my weekends to provide office hour-style support for Indigenous projects like this and recruit more technical people to help out. Eventually, I would love to see how we could scale up to providing real funding and technical support for Indigenous technical projects. Baby steps!