CoMapeo

Today's episode of SolarCast.

It is a dear pleasure of mine to be introducing today's guest, which is Luandro from Awana Digital. The projects that they carry out are incredibly inspiring, and I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. With no further ado, let's dive in. I'm so happy to be talking to you, Luandro.

And you are of course here representing Mapeo, and this is a project that's been going on for around 13–14 years now, or at least Awana Digital has. But before we dive in and I talk too much, what is Mapeo, what is Awana Digital, and who are you?

Hello, thank you for inviting me. So yeah, I'm Luandro. I am based in Belém, the Brazilian Amazon now. So Mapeo, which is now called Comapeo, is a peer-to-peer application for collaborative mapping used around the world, mostly around the tropics—South America, Africa, Southeast Asia.

It's used mostly by indigenous peoples for mapping and monitoring their territories to defend not only their territories, but also their cultures. You've been working with— is it Comapeo that is the new name? Yes, Comapeo is the newly released application, kind of the V2 of Mapeo. Ah, cool.

Well, just because I'm also very curious, what are the main differences between what Mapeo did and what Comapeo is doing? Well, there's not much of a difference. I mean, we had to make a choice to rewrite the whole application from scratch because of technical debt and also migrating our stacks such as Hypercore.

The whole native stack was just too complicated. It was much easier and safer to just rewrite everything so we can continue building on the platform. So we made the hard choice of starting from scratch, renaming, rebranding. But yeah, that made it possible for us to continue growing the platform.

So now Comapeo has other features that Mapeo didn't have.

Such as being able to record tracks. The whole peer-to-peer sync is much more stable. You can now have what we call a remote archive to be able to exchange data using an internet node. So that's something that also Mapeo didn't have. It was very local.

Amongst other features as well, and overall the application is much more stable. For people who are new to this environment—both practices and the importance of preserving digital sovereignty for indigenous communities—but also from the perspective of peer-to-peer, why does it matter?

That you're building with peer-to-peer technology in your use case? Yeah, so I think this is a very interesting use case for peer-to-peer—one of the most real ones. First thing: peer-to-peer gives us offline-first.

In a lot of communities, internet is still not available.

And this was even more the case a couple of years ago. Now this is changing a bit with Starlink. It has really spread across not only South America but across the world, so it's more common people have internet. But still, smaller communities often don’t have access.

So having something that works completely offline is key.

That doesn't rely on centralized infrastructure. That's key for a lot of indigenous communities. The other factor, which I think is the most important one, is data sovereignty.

So peer-to-peer, and how Hypercore in this case—which is the protocol that we're using—has all these cryptographic safeguards of the data.

So we can assure that the data is protected.

This is extremely useful for legal cases. A lot of the data that is being collected is very sensitive. Communities are dealing with violence from invaders—illegal mining, logging, and sometimes even drug trafficking within their territories.

So it's sensitive information. Having this data safeguarded against unwanted access is extremely important, and also for legal cases where the data goes to government entities.

Police, armies, and others so that action can be taken. The structure of our peer-to-peer append-only log gives us cryptographic proof that the data hasn't been tampered with, which is extremely important.

For legal cases and ensuring integrity. It also ensures the data isn't stolen by outsiders who could use it to compromise the community.

That’s really interesting, especially how append-only logs can be seen not as a bug but as a feature in this context. What considerations have you made around this?

You mean disadvantages? Or just the role in general? I'm not part of the technical team anymore, so I might get some details wrong.

But it's crucial for us because one of the main features of Comapeo is this proof that the data hasn't been tampered with, which is extremely important.