Using Ruby and Open Source to save cultures

Rudo will share his own story about how the Ruby community banded together to build an offline-compatible geostorytelling application designed for remote communities.

The design of Terrastories is being stewarded by the Amazon Conservation Team (ACT). With the support of ACT, Terrastories will be used by the Matawai Maroons in Suriname, the Wauja in Brazil, and the Kogui in Colombia to map oral histories about their sacred and ancestral sites, former settlements, and other places of significance.

The building of Terrastories was initiated at Ruby for Good 2018. The application is still under development, and we are aiming to have a first operational version ready by October 2018 for the Matawai. Later on, we will release a public version that any community anywhere in the world can use to map their own place-based storytelling traditions.

Rudo is a GIS specialist at the Amazon Conservation Team (rain forest not ecommerce). We have been building an app, terrastories.io for the last 8 months and he has slowly been learning to code in order to be more helpful and really be involved. He'd love to talk about his journey learning to write code and understand the tech as well as terrastories itself: a tool for communities to preserve their oral history through maps. If you are looking for speakers please let me know and I will put you in touch. The app is ruby on rails with some react and Mapbox GL-JS.