Advisory & Engagements
The problems worth working on sit at the intersection of things most practitioners treat separately.
Governance that cannot survive cultural contact is brittle. Technology that ignores the sources of authority behind an action encodes the wrong assumptions. Cultural work without durable structure struggles to travel or endure.
I work where these problems overlap: across law, human rights, culture, governance and emerging technology, particularly where different communities, institutions or systems need to coordinate without flattening their differences.
My strongest contribution is usually upstream, at the point where the conceptual architecture is still being formed: clarifying the problem, surfacing assumptions, establishing legitimate structures and designing a pathway that can survive contact with real people.
I have built stages as well as systems. That matters when the work has to function outside the diagram.
Areas of engagement:
Governance & Institutional Architecture
For institutions, coalitions, civic organisations and networks redesigning how decisions are made, authority is distributed and accountability is maintained.
I work on governance models that have to operate across real organisational cultures rather than simply look coherent on paper. This includes participation architecture, delegation and mandate structures, stewardship, decision processes, contribution and incentive systems, institutional transition and the translation of governance theory into workable practice.
Typical work: governance architecture, participatory systems, delegation and accountability models, decision frameworks, stewardship structures, organisational transition and adversarial stress-testing.
Reference work: Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand – Human Rights DAO, governance architecture, and Human Rights Token model for a 10-million person global movement. Currently in live pilot testing. Manifest - civic infrastructure for memory capture and remix.
Plural Authority, Standing & Digital Legitimacy
For systems where technical authentication is not enough and the harder question is why an action should count.
I work with standing, authority, delegation, consent, obligation, reliance and revocation across institutional, private, collective and machine-mediated environments. This is particularly relevant where different legal, cultural or organisational orders meet, or where authority needs to remain intelligible as it moves across systems.
The work may involve institutional delegation, AI-agent authority, private ordering, digital identity infrastructure, collective authority or interoperability between existing technical standards and richer legal or relational semantics.
Typical work: authority and standing architecture, delegation models, semantic specifications, agent mandate design, plural-order interoperability, consent and reliance frameworks, revocation architecture and standards analysis.
Reference work: SILT
SILT Core v0.2.0, an open semantic architecture for plural encounters. SILT models how Source-grounded Standing, bounded Presentation, Authority, Consent, Reliance and Revocation remain legible across institutional, cultural and technical boundaries, including recursive AI-agent delegation. The public specification and conformance suite are available at siltcore.org.
Civic Infrastructure & Emerging Technology
For human rights organisations, civil society, foundations and public-interest initiatives deciding where emerging technology can genuinely strengthen their work, and where it may create new dependencies or harms.
I work across AI, decentralised coordination, civic technology, privacy-enhancing systems, digital identity, open-source infrastructure and participatory platforms. The emphasis is practical: understanding what a technology changes institutionally and culturally before committing resources to it.
Typical work: technology strategy, AI and human rights analysis, civic infrastructure design, pilot scoping, technical partner assessment, governance and safeguards, emerging-technology research, institutional readiness and implementation pathways.
Reference work: Manifest, Human Rights DAO and current technology, governance and human rights innovation work with Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand.
Cultural Strategy, Community & Cross-Cultural Practice
For organisations working across cultural difference, entering new communities, rebuilding trust or developing participatory work where legitimacy cannot simply be assumed.
My approach comes from more than two decades of cultural production, intercultural programmes, community-led work and public activation across Aotearoa and the Asia-Pacific. I work with cultural relationships as part of the architecture of a project, not as a consultation layer added once the important decisions have already been made.
Typical work: cross-cultural strategy, community and stakeholder engagement, participatory design, cultural infrastructure, programme architecture, creative direction, public activation and facilitated encounters across difference.
Reference work: People In Your Neighbourhood – NZ Human Rights Commission Diversity in Action Award 2009. Khuja Lounge – five-year intercultural venue ecosystem, Auckland. British Council Active Citizens programme. Te Karanga ā Hape – Matariki hub, wānanga and public activation, Karangahape Road.
Results: what the work has built and tested
Governance infrastructure for a global human rights movement Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand began exploring whether decentralised governance could support new forms of participation across an international human rights movement.
The work moved from governance and incentive architecture through an operational pilot with participants in Aotearoa and internationally, generating practical evidence about fairness, pseudonymity, participation, deliberation and the relationship between technical governance and organisational culture.
The resulting open-source work now informs a wider programme of civic infrastructure development.
Relevant to: NGOs and coalitions redesigning participation; foundations exploring decentralised governance; civic technology projects that need legitimacy and accountability to survive beyond the prototype.
Authority and legitimacy in emerging digital systems Authentication tells us that a system or key performed an action. It does not necessarily tell us why that action should carry authority.
Through SILT I am researching the semantic layer beneath questions of institutional delegation, collective authority, private ordering and increasingly autonomous systems: where standing comes from, what is presented into an encounter, what authority follows, who may rely upon it and how that authority can be withdrawn.
The work is deliberately complementary to existing identity, agent and capability infrastructures rather than attempting to replace them.
Relevant to: AI-agent platforms; identity and trust infrastructure; standards organisations; institutional delegation systems; governance and legal teams working with machine-mediated action.
Civic memory and participation infrastructure Testimony, cultural memory and participation are forms of civic power. In contested environments, the challenge is not simply how to capture them, but how to protect contributors, preserve provenance, allow material to travel and remix, and avoid creating new points of vulnerability.
Manifest explores this problem as civic infrastructure: connecting witness, memory, creative expression and participation through rights-aligned technical and governance design.
Relevant to: human rights organisations; civic movements; journalism and archival initiatives; foundations; digital rights and cultural sovereignty programmes.
Community activation and the testing of relational legitimacy Governance frameworks are propositions. They describe how authority should be held, how participation should flow, how accountability should be structured. But propositions that have never met real communities are brittle – they encode the assumptions of their designers rather than the lived conditions of the people they are meant to serve.
For two decades, before the language of governance design existed in the contexts I now work in, I was testing these questions in practice. Through Khuja Lounge – a five-year intercultural venue ecosystem in Auckland – through a record label, through public activations, community consultation processes, and participatory formats across Aotearoa and the Asia-Pacific, I was working on the same foundational problem: how do you build structures that earn legitimacy from diverse communities rather than simply asserting it?
That body of work – with the PIYN project recognised by the NZ Human Rights Commission Diversity in Action Award in 2009 – is not separate from the technical and governance work I do now. It is its foundation. It is why the governance and technical systems I design begin with relationship rather than assuming cultural difference can be abstracted away. It is why I test architecture against lived friction, not merely internal coherence.
Technology deployed without relational legitimacy fails, regardless of how elegant its architecture is.
Relevant to: Organisations deploying technology in culturally complex or Pacific contexts; AI governance initiatives where community legitimacy is not assumed; development agencies and foundations working at the intersection of digital rights and cultural sovereignty; institutions in civic transition needing to rebuild trust across difference.
How I work
I listen before I design, surface assumptions early and test architecture against real cultural, institutional and technical conditions.
My strongest contribution is usually at the conceptual and strategic architecture stage, where early decisions determine whether a project can hold under pressure, scale without losing its values or earn legitimacy from the people it affects. I can stay with the work through research, co-design, implementation strategy, facilitation and public activation where useful.
Engagements typically take one of three forms:
Advisory relationship – Ongoing strategic input for organisations navigating complex governance, technology, cultural or institutional questions over time.
Defined project – A bounded mandate with clear outputs: governance architecture, research, a technical or semantic framework, civic infrastructure scope, strategic roadmap, concept note, white paper or implementation plan.
Workshop / facilitated encounter – A structured process designed to surface hidden assumptions, stress-test a proposal, bring different perspectives into relation and establish a shared basis for action.
Embedded strategic role – Longer engagement inside an organisation or project where the work crosses multiple domains and benefits from sustained senior-level continuity rather than a series of isolated commissions.
I work across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. Remote engagement is standard; in-person is available for the right mandates.
Who I work with
I am most useful where the problem crosses disciplines, jurisdictions or communities and a conventional single-domain solution is unlikely to be enough.
This includes human rights and civil society organisations; Indigenous and community-led initiatives; foundations and development organisations; cultural institutions; civic technology projects; standards and protocol communities; research organisations; AI and emerging-technology teams; and institutions undergoing governance or technological transition.
I am particularly interested in work involving plural authority, cultural complexity, institutional transformation, civic infrastructure or emerging technologies whose social consequences are not yet settled.
Let's work together
If you are working on something that crosses cultural, institutional, legal or technological boundaries, particularly where the existing categories are part of the problem, I would be interested to hear about it.
If the work crosses worlds, that is usually where I am most useful.
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