Terrastories

Terrastories ties audio and video oral histories to places on an interactive map, with community-controlled access — stories can be public, restricted, or private, because not every story is for everyone. It shipped first in 2018 for the Matawai Maroon communities mapping histories along Suriname's Saramacca River, built by Awana Digital (formerly Digital Democracy) with a volunteer developer community, and now runs from Indigenous ranger networks in the Solomon Islands to youth documentation projects in Brazil.

It's MIT-licensed, actively maintained, and ships a fully offline 'Field Kit' — the whole application can run on a Raspberry Pi with no internet and no cloud, which is both an access feature and a sovereignty feature: the community's stories live on the community's hardware.

Neighborhood remix: 'This corner used to be…' — elders record 90-second stories pinned to the laundromat, the old ballfield, the mural; the map runs at the branch library; the access controls mean the block decides which stories the whole internet gets.

Details

• maker: Awana Digital + volunteer community (Ruby for Good)
• hosted: self-host; offline Field Kit
• license: MIT
• ctfg url: https://civictech.guide/listing/terrastories
• repo url: https://github.com/Terrastories/terrastories
• remix idea: 'This corner used to be…' — elder stories pinned to places, running at the library.
• practice kind: tool