The Efficacy of Digital Mapping Workshops (IMW) in Transferring Traditional Knowledge and Data Governance Skills to Indigenous Communities
Abstract
This study employs Participatory Action Research (PAR) to assess the dual-dimensional efficacy of Indigenous Mapping Workshops (IMW) within the Australian Indigenous Mapping Workshop programme, evaluating their contribution to ancestral knowledge preservation and practical community capacity in GIS and Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS). The research positions digital mapping as a convergence site where Western geospatial science meets the ontological imperatives of Indigenous land relationships, generating opportunities and tensions that existing evaluative frameworks inadequately capture. Through direct collaborative engagement with participants from three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in South-East Queensland, the Northern Territory Top End, and the Pilbara region, the PAR methodology monitors post-workshop deployment of GIS skills in community-led land management, native title, and cultural heritage protection, while assessing intergenerational knowledge transfer and horizontal technology skills transfer. Findings reveal that the IMW model is most efficacious as a knowledge preservation instrument when governed by community-determined protocols, with epistemic authority determining what is mapped, at what scale, and under what access governance. Conversely, the model generates the highest data governance capacity when participants are equipped not merely with technical GIS skills but with conceptual frameworks for asserting Indigenous Data Sovereignty, including the CARE Principles, the OCAP Principles (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession), and Traditional Knowledge (TK) Labels that translate community authority into technically enforceable instruments. The study contributes the Community Spatial Sovereignty Framework (CSSF), an evidence-based protocol architecture for the design and evaluation of future IMW programmes that maximises efficacy across both knowledge preservation and data governance dimensions, thereby ensuring long-term self-determination within evolving national digital policy landscapes.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.51817/jas.v7i1.447
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