NOTE: 100% of the proceeds from my Github Sponsorships will be reinvested in Terrastories. We will use the funds to pay for website space, hosting costs, or consultants to work on key aspects of the application.

The path that has led me to coding and open-source is not a usual one.

Trained as an anthropologist, I have worked with indigenous communities in South America since the early 2010s, helping them make maps from their own worldview, both as a tool to defend and gain rights over their ancestral forests, and to help them retain traditional knowledge about their lands.

With the Amazon Conservation Team, I supported the Matawai Maroons (descendants of formerly enslaved Africans) in developing a comprehensive map of their lands along the Saramacca River, where their ancestors fled to over three centuries ago. In so doing, we discovered that the Matawai youth were no longer traveling along the river like their ancestors used to, and needed tools to help them learn of the rich oral histories about their lands.

We wanted to use interactive web maps with landscape stories to bring the territory maps we produced to life, but like other rainforest communities, the Matawai live in a remote area without internet access. So, we decided to try building own open-source application, and so Terrastories was born.

Terrastories is a geostorytelling application built to enable local communities to locate and map their own oral storytelling traditions about places of significant meaning or value to them. Community members can add places and stories through a user-friendly interface, and make decisions about designating certain stories as private or restricted. Built with the Mapbox platform, Terrastories works both online and offline, so that remote communities can access the application entirely without needing internet connectivity.

Through great serendipity, we were able to find a wonderful community of open-source developers to help us build Terrastories, starting with Ruby for Good and later others who found us through Github and other channels.

We have a dedicated and passionate community of volunteers working to build Terrastories. We've had over 60 contributors on Github so far and that isn't counting designers who have put in work. I am one of several core developers who are stewarding the development work.