Trailmark

Conventional knowledge management techniques and technologies used by states and development proponents cannot adequately represent the complexity and quality of Indigenous cultural and ontological systems. In negotiations and reconciliation discussions, Indigenous communities have been at a great disadvantage in conveying the nature and richness of their ancestral knowledge, responsibilities, and title. Trailmark was created, and has grown, to give expression to these relationships. It does this by bringing together qualitative and quantitative data analysis and visualization tools with mapping, field data collections tools, and work flows that are unique to Indigenous communities territorial and cultural management needs.

Trailmark is the innovative software Indigenous communities are using to protect and manage their traditional territories. Our team includes practitioners with first-hand experience in impact assessment, ethnohistory, land claims, and wildlife management. We created Trailmark to solve the problems we encounter ensuring Indigenous knowledge is included in research and resource management decisions. Communities use Trailmark for monitoring, mapping, protecting heritage sites, managing wildlife, digitizing archives, and managing referrals. Trailmark is dedicated to preserving information sovereignty and control with a flexible system that lets communities set permission levels for each user and control access to all materials. Trailmark is Software-as-a-Service, meaning users do not have to buy or install anything. Communities own their data, Trailmark provides the software to keep it safe and accessible. 

Web GIS centralizes spatial data from participatory mapping, surveys, mobile data collection, and archives and allows users to view, search, filter, and compare with other data. 

Digital archive allows Indigenous communities to catalogue, search, and safely store heritage documents and research about their lands and waters. 

Mobile data collection adds real-time, on-the-land observations to your geospatial database and maps. 

Participatory mapping creates mapped sites based on map biographies and traditional land use interviews. 

Referrals tracks and assesses applications from land developers, allowing Indigenous governments to protect their interests in relation to proposed projects in their territory. 

Spatial surveys for remote or in- person community engagement. Unlike other online survey tools, Trailmark’s allows users to add information to maps in addition to other form-based questions.

Stories allows users to curate and share media rich stories about their histories, cultures, and territories.

The software operates as an inter-community data platform for connected communities to share field forms, data, stories, maps, archival records and documents, and workflows.

Our partners and users are almost entirely Indigenous heritage, land, stewardship, and fisheries departments who have been historically underserved by conventional software solutions which are overly restrictive or narrowly quantitative, eg. GIS or archival science softwares. The knowledge our users make with Trailmark informs natural and cultural resource management, land use planning, informs negotiations, impact assessments, and many other use cases.

Trailmark was founded in 2014 and we launched our first beta version of the platform that year. Our first community partners and clients were northern Straits communities on southern Vancouver Island and Inuit communities in Nunavut. Our software users range from technically sophisticated departmental staff who have a wide range of data visualization and reporting needs to Elders and harvesters, who may have modest digital literacy. Many of our partners and clients live in remote communities with poor connectivity. Our users are located in British Columbia, Alberta, the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Ontario, Newfoundland / Labrador, and several communities in Australia.

We work constantly with our partners and clients to understand their evolving needs and grow the platform to suit them. This work includes research and assistance to their lands departments, design sessions, ongoing tech support, and frequent outreach. Roughly half of our software functions have been built at specific request by one of our community partners.

Our team includes practitioners with first-hand experience in impact assessment, ethnohistory, land claims, and wildlife management. We created Trailmark to solve the problems we encounter ensuring Indigenous knowledge is included in research and resource management decisions. All of us are embedded in our work with Indigenous communities on a daily basis, and work directly with the communities we serve in research and negotiation support roles. The Team Lead(s) have spent their adult lives as inter-cultural workers and experts in cultural and historical research and land claims. We teach, use, and conduct software design engagements with our partners frequently. 

Trailmark has been completely bootstrapped and built from revenues and contributions from community partners and clients. It has become a well-known platform for Indigenous knowledge management in Canada despite the fact that we have never once marketed it. We have no marketing plan, and have not conducted any marketing. We have no plan for scaling, and yet we have a new version of the platform that we have spent the last 30 months building which is ready, technically, for scale. We are particularly interested in making partnerships and connections through Solve to develop and execute marketing and scaling plans. I'm not talking about investment, but knowledge and guidance. In addition, we are committed to finding a pathway to Indigenous ownership of Trailmark; there are many different paths this could take, and we would like to seek assistance developing a strategy.

The team lead is not an Indigenous person, and our company is not an Indigenous-owned company. Nevertheless the reason for our platform's existence, and our company's, is to work with and serve Indigenous communities in their efforts to preserve and enhance culture, and land rights and title. We have been very successful in this regard, and have developed close and trusting relationships with our partners over the years.

Our platform's core functions and design have evolved out of close relationships with our clients and partners. We are looking, alongside a plan to scale-up the platform, to develop a model for Indigenous ownership. 

Trailmark is unique in its approach to integrating unstructured and structured data. Traditional Indigenous knowledge, when codified, exists in the world as largely unstructured data (songs, texts, audio and visual media), while the modern management requirements of Indigenous communities demand highly structured scientific and geospatial data. Conventional GIS technologies do no do unstructured data, and qualitative data platforms do not do GIS. Trailmark bridges the divide between disciplines and research methods just as it attempts to bridge Indigenous and conventional Western science.

Trailmark would benefit greatly, and downstream of this so would our partners and users, from learning from other social impact companies in this space. We will continue to change the small market in which we work, but there are larger markets -- post-secondary education; environmental non-profit; small government -- that could also make use of the tools within the Trailmark platform, if we could scale up.

We measure our goals in communities, organizations, and individual platform users; training hours delivered; number of impactful outputs of the software that have resulted in better environmental, justice, or social outcomes for Indigenous communities; number of projects that go toward enhancing Indigenous stewardship resulting in cleaner terrestrial and freshwater environments; improvements in the capacity of our partners to manage consultation with the state and proponents; improved digital literacy among Indigenous youth.

Trailmark consists of both a cloud SaaS backend with a range of core functionalities including web mapping, digital records management, qualitative analysis, online spatial survey building and analysis tools, tools for oral history and participatory mapping, and digital story-telling tools. Access and permissions tools are flexible and based upon traditional Salish intellectual property concepts. AI is incorporated into the platform through openAI's API and set to work on discrete archives, where users can query unstructured text archives (oral histories, reports, maps, etc...) for reporting. Additional full text indexing of unstructured and structured (spatial) data is accomplished through Amazon Textract. 

Trailmark has a diverse staff and supports a safe and inclusive work culture. Our culture is committed to diversity, culturally grounded expertise, creative energy, and personal growth. As evidence of our success in creating a comfortable and energizing space for staff, Trailmark has a very low churn for both staff and partners and clients. Very few people have started working for Trailmark and not stayed. The majority of our staff have been colleagues since the earliest days of the company. Our staff share the founders' motivating social values and goals.

Trailmark provides SaaS, custom, research and training services to Indigenous communities. 

Our services to communities focus on traditional land use and knowledge research, archival and historical analysis, and land claims. Our research directly informs the outcomes our clients are able to negotiate or win from impact assessment panels and courts. We provide these services largely by word-of-mouth based on our excellent reputation.

Our custom apps focus on Indigenous food security issues One of our apps, Can U Dig It, was built with an Indigenous fisheries organization in BC to give Indigenous harvesters access to near real-time data on shellfish and water quality data. The impact of this and other custom apps is to improve Indigenous health and food security and positively impact community and Individual health.

Our SaaS platform, Trailmark, has significant impacts on the communities where it is used. It has helped communities achieve significantly more control over data and research priorities, has resulted in achievements in digital repatriation, and 

Trailmark is already financially sustainable on both its products, SaaS, and services. However, our boot-strapping method of building and growing our company will not permit the scaling up of the platform without at least some investment, which we have been loathe to do unless the source is an Indigenous investment or other firm.

Our funders have been Indigenous communities and governments in the form of software subscriptions (30%), research and consulting advice (60%) and custom software (10%). We achieved financial sustainability without any investments. Our company has no debts, and no institutional obligations. Our profits are modest, but the salaries we provide our staff and our re-investments in our platform are reasonably robust.