Protocols in Indigenous cultures are not simply commandments or statements of norms such as, “Look after Country and Country will look after you”. Protocols are quite specific and deal with relational behaviours that must be adhered to in specific contexts (e.g. Where does a young person direct their voice and gaze when in the presence of an opposite gender Elder of high status?). In our yarns to begin outlining and testing various protocols, we commenced quite broadly with general Indigenous ethics, building on previous work in this area (Lewis et al, 2020) which was a good ethical starting point but did not elucidate the specificity that software engineers require to inform programming standards, protocols or, rules as code.

We began this work with an awareness of Indigenous data sovereignty issues an emergent field involving Indigenous control over the protection and use of data that is collected from our communities, including statistics, cultural knowledge and even user data. We nicknamed our desired protocols around this as ‘Blackfella box’, referencing the idea of ‘black boxes’ in digital systems; this was our shorthand for identifying areas of knowledge that we could not share with the world. We also flagged this as a potential test case for automating a restricted knowledge protocol, possibly using a blockchain/smart contract application that we referred to as “Proof of Aunty”, asserting that proof of cultural authority is more of a priority for us than proof of stake or proof of work...

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