Michuksüs! Mvto! Nya:weh!
With 2022 beyond us, we’re excited to share some highlights with you. This has been a wild year, a tough year, and a year that has sparked a lot of change. We would like to highlight some of the work we have done this year to help grow the Natives in Tech ecosystem.
Natives in Tech is a collective of Native technologists crafting free and open source technology that empowers Native peoples. With this goal in mind, our initiatives are centered around networking aspiring and experienced technologists alike, creating a strong social media presence on platforms familiar to technologists, hosting a yearly conference, and building Native-centric technology.
We are so excited to report back on our work towards these aims.
Growth of Our Community
We added 71 new members to our Slack community! Here is the breakdown by year:
| 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 17 | 7 | 30 | 48 | 69 | 71 | 242 |
LinkedIn: 653 in 2021, 1519 in 2022, 866 new followers during 2022, a 43% growth in the last year!
We’re so grateful to every member of our community. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and supporting each other throughout the year.
If you are a Native technologist and you would like to join our community Slack, please send us an email at hello@nativesintech.org.
Shipt becomes first organizational sponsor of 2023
We have been really lucky and thankful for the support of Shipt and BestBuy. With their donations, we are able to organize so much. Our annual conference in 2022 being our marquee event that would not have happened without them. Thank you!
Natives in Tech Conf 2022
The Natives in Tech conference took place last November and consisted of two days of keynotes, lightning talks, workshops, networking, and panels about technology and its impact on the lives and experiences as Indigenous Peoples. You can learn more about our conference by visiting our NiT Conf 2022 site or watch the conference videos (or if you loved it so much, you want to watch it again!)
Huge thank you to everyone who made the conference so fun and engaging.
Native Owned Businesses Directory
Native Owned Businesses is a curated directory of Native businesses of all kinds throughout the United States. This project is an initiative of Native in Tech, a collective of Natives in technology building free and open source technology for Native communities.
The Innovation WG has continued to hum along building out the Native Owned Business Directory: https://businesses.bynatives.app/. It’s powered by Netlify CMS, hosted on Netlify, and all changes, such as adding or removing businesses, are made as direct commits to the repository: https://github.com/nativesintech/cms.bynatives.app. We need support improving the app and adding more businesses. We hope to make it the go-to location for Native Owned Businesses.
If you are a Native-owned business and want to join the directory, please send an email to hello@nativesintech.org with your name, email, and nation.
Native Talent in Tech
The underlying library for the Native Talent in Tech website went through a redesign and those changes were finally deployed! The talent page includes a jobs board, and if your company has a new job posting, you can support NiT work by posting it there! Check out the new look at https://talent.nativesintech.org/.
If you would like to nominate anyone (including yourself) for the site let us know at hello@nativesintech.org.
The Future
Natives in Tech is excited to be working through shifting the non-profit into an organizing model that integrates working groups and truly works as more like a collective.
Our non-administrative working groups are:
- Innovation - Building technology that supports Native peoples and communities.
- Community - Building community by creating spaces that allow Native technologists to be authentic and find one another.
- Education - Helping to educate our communities with a yearly conference that discusses issues and innovations at the intersections of Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous rights, technology, and cultural perpetuity.
- Activism - Working to shed light on the many issues that technology presents and introduce thoughtful interventions within the ongoing colonial structures that undermine our cultures and sovereignty.
We have found that working in these horizontal ways allows for more equitable representation of everyone’s individual voice. Does this sound interesting? Learn more about how you join one of our working groups by emailing hello@nativesintech.org.
Dear Apache Software Foundation, …
Natives in Tech Activism working group members recently came together to develop a blog post asking the Apache Software Foundation to #ChangeTheName and choose something less rife with cultural baggage. It was soon featured in ars technica, slashdot, PC Mag, Hacker News, and read around the world.
We would like to highlight those working in the NiT community on this effort: Walter Cameron and Leo Vicenti.
"As progress is being made, taking down mascots in professional sports the software industry has lagged behind. The ASF is one of the largest open source foundations out there and if open source is to be sustainable it can't have room for exclusionary mascots."
Walter Cameron, Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska citizen and maintainer of endasfmascotry.com
"Aside from the numerous ethical battleground’s that face indigenous peoples, it’s most important that settlers operating in this day and age consider what can be done for reconciliation."
Leo Vicenti, Jicarilla Apache Nation citizen
Please visit, support, and sign onto this important call to action directly at: https://www.endasfmascotry.com/
If you would like to join the Activism Working Group please do so by joining our Slack!
How to Support Our Work
- Become a financial contributor and help us sustain our community. Learn more here.
- If you are a Native technologist and you would like to join our community Slack, please send us an email at hello@nativesintech.org.
- If you feel passionate about building professional associations and communities for Indigenous Peoples in tech, we hope you will consider joining a working group. This is your invitation!
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to board@nativesintech.org.
