Advocacy, Technology & Having a Seat At the Table - Our Heritage Tech Toolkit

I’ve been building an open-source cultural stewardship and AI literacy toolkit alongside the Pulau Brani Project because I increasingly feel that access to advocacy, storytelling, archives, technological literacy, and public participation should be democratized.

Too often, the ability to shape public narratives — to preserve memory, articulate community concerns, build educational tools, experiment with technology, or advocate for what matters — is treated as the domain of institutions, specialists, or people with resources and the luxury of time. But communities whose stories, languages, rituals, and histories are already underrepresented should not have to choose between survival and visibility.

The toolkit combines participatory archive systems, oral history tools, dialect and pronunciation archives, youth co-creation modules, storytelling frameworks, AI literacy exercises, governance systems, and experimental AI-assisted heritage tools. A major emphasis throughout is building open, understandable tools and frameworks that students, educators, families, researchers, and communities themselves can contribute to and shape collaboratively.

I’m not a coder by training, and I wouldn’t describe myself as a civil society leader either. I’m learning publicly, building incrementally, and trying to create space for broader participation, critique, experimentation, and stewardship. A lot of this work is imperfect and evolving, but I believe strongly that communities deserve access to the systems that increasingly shape how memory, language, archives, and public narratives are preserved and circulated.

Part of what motivates this work is also a discomfort with how many conversations around AI are increasingly framed through simplified moral binaries - “AI versus humans,” “technology versus dignity,” “efficiency versus care.” The anxieties underlying these debates are real and deserve to be taken seriously. But many of the structural pressures people are experiencing around precarity, exclusion, visibility, and economic insecurity long predate generative AI. AI is accelerating some of those dynamics, certainly, but it is also becoming the visible vessel into which broader social anxieties are being poured.

For me, the more important question is not whether communities should passively accept or reject these systems wholesale, but whether they will have meaningful opportunities to participate in shaping them. Disengaging from these technologies does not necessarily insulate communities from their effects; in many cases, it risks excluding them from the conversations, governance structures, and capabilities that will increasingly influence public life.

I think communities deserve the tools, literacy, and institutional space to engage critically, ethically, and creatively with these systems - not because technology replaces human judgment, memory, or lived experience, but precisely because some forms of meaning, interpretation, care, legitimacy, and accountability remain deeply and irreducibly human.