Our Mission

The Peoples Open Codex Alliance builds and gives away free, open-source software that lets Indigenous communities keep, teach, and grow their own cultures on technology the communities themselves own, without surrendering anything to the cloud.

The Problem We Address

Technology today asks Indigenous communities to make a bad trade: digitize your culture and surrender it to somebody else's servers, or keep it offline and watch it thin out. Both options end with the community losing control of what is theirs.

The stakes are documented. The U.S. Department of the Interior has identified 408 federal Indian boarding schools that operated from 1819 to 1969 under an explicit policy of erasing Indigenous languages and cultures. Linguists project that between 50% and 90% of the world's roughly 7,000 languages may be severely endangered or gone by 2100. And only about 53% of homes on tribal lands have broadband today, against 82% in the rest of the United States, so software that requires the cloud does not serve these communities even when they want it.

Our Answer

We build the third way. A community's whole cultural library (its stories, language, calendar, land knowledge, ceremony, and well-being resources) lives on one microSD card the community owns, holds, and signs with its own cryptographic key. Ordinary, inexpensive tablets, including recycled ones, read the card. The core applications request no internet permission at all: nothing is uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it.

The software is free of charge and always will be. The code is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, so any community can read it, audit it, fork it, and re-center it on itself. You own everything on the card. We own nothing of yours.