Technology is never just technical.

Every digital system embeds assumptions about participation, authority, memory, access and control. My work in technology begins with those assumptions: who can act, how decisions are made, what information persists, how authority travels and where accountability sits when systems become distributed or increasingly autonomous.

I work across civic technology, decentralised coordination, AI, digital identity and semantic infrastructure, particularly where technical design intersects with human rights, culture, governance and plural forms of authority.

The aim is not technological novelty for its own sake. It is to build systems capable of coordinating people, institutions and increasingly machine actors without eroding the relationships, responsibilities and forms of legitimacy that make collective action meaningful.

Architecture before tooling

I tend to work upstream of implementation.
Before choosing a chain, credential format, agent framework or platform, I ask what the system is actually trying to make possible: what relationships need to exist, where authority originates, what can be delegated, what must remain revocable, who may rely on an action, and what happens when participants do not share the same institutional or cultural assumptions.

Those decisions shape the technology that follows. Good infrastructure does not remove complexity. It gives complexity somewhere coherent to live.

AI, agents and delegated action

AI agents sharpen problems that already exist in institutional life.

A system may be technically capable of acting, transacting or delegating further action without that capability answering the harder questions: under what authority is it acting, what is the scope of that authority, what obligations attach to the action, who may rely on it, and how does that authority end?

My interest is not in turning AI agents into synthetic legal persons. It is in designing clearer semantic and governance boundaries around machine-mediated action, particularly where authority may become recursive or distributed across human, institutional and technical actors.

Decentralised coordination

Distributed systems create new possibilities for participation, transparency and collective decision-making, but decentralisation alone does not produce legitimacy.

My work in this area examines governance architecture, participation, incentives, delegation, stewardship and accountability across DAOs and civic platforms. The question is always less “how decentralised can this become?” than what kind of coordination should this technology make possible, and what safeguards allow it to remain accountable as it scales?

The Human Rights DAO work with Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand has provided a live environment for testing these questions across governance design, participation, incentive architecture and organisational culture. The project moved from research and governance modelling through to an operational pilot and open-source outputs.

Civic infrastructure and human rights

Technology increasingly shapes how communities organise, how testimony is preserved, how campaigns travel, how institutions make decisions and how people enter public life.

I work with civic and human rights organisations to explore where emerging technologies can strengthen participation, memory, privacy, coordination and organisational resilience, while remaining alert to surveillance, exclusion, extractive data practices and technological dependency.

This includes research and strategy across AI, decentralised governance, digital identity, privacy-enhancing technologies, open-source infrastructure and rights-aligned civic systems.

My work also extends into DePIN and spatial systems – examining how decentralised physical infrastructure networks and location-aware technologies reshape resource allocation, access and civic participation. Spatial coordination is governance in material form. It requires identity clarity, incentive alignment and transparent rule-sets.
This technological work is grounded in community activation and cultural production. Systems do not live on-chain alone. They live through people, places and practice.

The through-line is coherence across law, culture and code – building infrastructures capable of memory, plurality and accountable coordination in an increasingly machine-mediated world.

This work includes:
– Authority-layer frameworks
– Role-based delegation models
– Governance token architectures
– Semantic constraints for AI agents
– Spatial coordination systems for community infrastructure


Some Key Projects below:

Latest essay

Who Authorised the Agent? AI Delegation and the Missing Legal Identity Layer
A new piece exploring identity architecture for autonomous AI systems.

Read the essay →