Earth Month Convergence
community-directed tech garden
Data justice, community-controlled knowledge systems, and technologies designed to serve people.
A playful, hands-on space for imagining and building protopian futures
Our Tech Garden invites folx to reimagine protopian futures not as distant ideals but as something we actively create together now. Through experiments and conversations, we explore what it looks like to store knowledge on individual, community own
how do we reclaim technology from extractive systems and root in local, collective care?
We're living in an age where technology is overtly cooptive, exploitative, and extractive, carrying layers of oppression, suppression, and repression within it. But innovation itself isn't the problem. What's been bad is the way innovation has been pursued in a Western, extractive sense, optimized for control and profit rather than for people.
So we ask: what does it look like to reframe that? To work alongside technologists who understand where big tech is headed, and to build a strategy for redirecting that skill and knowledge toward something that actually benefits communities -- Indigenous communities, Black communities, rural communities, and beyond?
Our Community-Directed Tech garden puts technology directly into people's hands.
In 2026, put solar energy directly into people's hands with a
Solar-Powered Butterfly workshop by Low Pwr Lab, a hands-on way to understand how solar panels work.
Imagining Speculative Technologies, an interactive workshop opened the door to something bigger: community-directed, solar-powered mesh networks that offer real connectivity. Connectivity that doesn't run through tech billionaires, and doesn't hand over more ground to surveillance.
The question driving this work -- how do we use technology as a tool for our communities, not a replacement for them, without destroying the planet in the process? -- is now shaping the active work we are doing on the ground in Flatbush with our community partners.
data, archives, and who gets to
keep what's ours?
This track also inquires about data: how it's stored, who controls it, and how do we stop this theft of information. Local technologies and artists are already building their own collectives and storing their work, so it can't be scraped or taken by big Tech Companies or absorbed by AI systems that have taken musician's music before it was even released.
This is part of our living archive, too: figuring out how we can store our information in ways that put a stop to that extraction and reclaim control over our own knowledge.
This is also our newest track and one that is still unfolding; it is a living example of what community-directed technology could look like, rooted in autonomy, care, and the belief that the tools we build should serve communities first.
Track activations
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