Cultural Stewardship in Tech

Cultural stewardship, cultural appropriation, cultural erasure, data stewardship, Indigenous data sovereignty, cultural protocols, community authorship, authorship and ownership, cultural sovereignty, ethical design, consent-based storytelling, AI, algorithm, algorithmic bias, AI training data, data scraping, machine learning, dataset, metadata, open-source tools, extractive technologies, archival justice, platform governance, CARE Principles

1. Define cultural stewardship in technology and media. Understand cultural stewardship as the practice of care, responsibility, and accountability in how technologies are designed, used, and shared. Apply this to digital tools, media platforms, and AI systems that influence how cultures are represented and circulated.
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2. Recognize how technology carries and shapes culture. Explore how design choices, algorithms, and platform structures reflect cultural values. Understand how these systems affect whose cultures are seen, distorted, excluded, or commodified.
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3. Identify cultural appropriation and erasure in tech spaces. Examine how cultural knowledge is copied, decontextualized, or extracted in digital and AI environments. Understand appropriation as a form of structural harm that disconnects culture from its people and protocols.
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4. Understand data stewardship as a cultural issue. Recognize that data and metadata are not neutral. Learn why community control over archives, platforms, and infrastructures is vital, especially when AI systems are trained on cultural material without consent.
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5. Learn from Black, Indigenous, and disabled models of stewardship. Engage with approaches rooted in protocol, consent, authorship, and cultural survival. See how these communities protect knowledge and create alternatives to extractive tech systems.
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6. Explore tools and frameworks that support cultural stewardship. Get introduced to platforms and design practices that center sovereignty and accountability, including Mukurtu CMS, the CARE Principles, open-source tools, and ethical data guidelines that address cultural misuse and algorithmic appropriation.