Sovereignty
how Antiari Voces is governed by the communities it serves
Antiari Voces is built on a single principle. The communities that share their voices through this interface are the owners of those voices, the observations, and the data derived from them. Saphi operates the infrastructure. The communities hold the authority. This page documents what that means in practice, in terms that can be verified.
The principles
The first framework is Free, Prior and Informed Consent under the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and International Labour Organization Convention 169. No community is represented in Antiari Voces without a written FPIC agreement specifying what the agent may do, what it may not do, and the terms under which consent may be withdrawn. UNDRIP
The second framework is the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics. CARE complements the technical FAIR principles by centring the people whose lives the data describes, and it shapes every storage, access, and deletion decision the agent makes. GIDA · CARE
The third framework is the Local Contexts Hub Traditional Knowledge Labels and Biocultural Labels. Each Antiari record carries a machine-readable label, cryptographically bound to the row, that signals the consent terms set by the originating community at the moment of capture. Local Contexts
Who consented to what
| Community / Federation | Territory | FPIC date | Languages | Data governance terms |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asháninka federation — placeholderawaiting verification | Selva Central — placeholder | awaiting agreement | Asháninka, Español — placeholder | Voice and transcript retained on community-controlled storage. Deletion honoured within 7 days. — placeholder |
| Yanesha federation — placeholderawaiting verification | Soqtapata — placeholder | awaiting agreement | Yanesha, Español — placeholder | Audio not retained beyond transcription. Transcript controlled by federation. — placeholder |
| Shipibo-Konibo federation — placeholderawaiting verification | Avireri Biosphere — placeholder | awaiting agreement | Shipibo-Konibo, Español — placeholder | Sacred-site recordings excluded from any downstream routing. — placeholder |
Communities are added to this table only after a formal Free, Prior and Informed Consent agreement has been signed, and only with explicit permission to be named publicly. Communities may request removal from this table at any time, and the removal will be honoured within seven days.
What the agent does · and does not do
What the agent does
- Receive voice notes in seven languages and transcribe them with multilingual speech-recognition.
- Tag every recording with a Local Contexts Traditional Knowledge Label that captures the consent terms set by the community.
- Route urgent alerts about land incursions, deforestation, and water contamination into Saphi Intelligence for response.
- Answer questions about concession boundaries, agreed payments, and contract terms in the language the user prefers.
- Maintain a complete audit log of every interaction, accessible to the federation that represents the user’s community.
What the agent does not do
- Sell or share community voice recordings with any third party outside the explicit terms of the relevant FPIC agreement.
- Train external machine-learning models on community voice data.
- Override or replace any decision-making process that exists within the community.
- Operate without the consent of the federation representing the user’s community.
- Retain any recording after a deletion request from the community of origin, beyond a seven-day operational window.
The data lifecycle
A voice note begins inside WhatsApp on the user’s own device, captured by the WhatsApp client and transmitted through Meta’s end-to-end encrypted channel to the Antiari Agent. Until that moment, no Antiari system has any knowledge of the recording.
Once the recording arrives at the agent, it is passed to the multilingual speech-recognition layer and transcribed in the language the speaker chose. The audio file and the transcript are written to community-controlled storage, with a Traditional Knowledge Label attached at the row level that encodes the consent terms set by the originating federation.
Where the recording contains an operational signal — a request, an alert, an observation about the land — the relevant fields are routed downstream into Saphi Intelligence so that a response can be coordinated. The audio itself does not travel further than the storage boundary unless the consent terms explicitly permit it.
Retention follows the community’s stated terms. Some federations authorise indefinite retention of transcripts as part of their own territorial record. Others authorise transcription only and require the audio to be discarded within hours of capture. The label travels with the data and the system honours it.
The user can request deletion of every recording associated with their identity or their community at any time, and the request is honoured within seven days.
The technical layer
- Multilingual speech recognitionin development
Models adapted for Amazonian Spanish and the Indigenous languages, with community-linguist review of transcription quality.
- Traditional Knowledge Labels
Local Contexts Hub TK and BC Labels embedded as machine-readable metadata on every record.
- Verifiable Credentialsin development
W3C Verifiable Credentials issued to community signers so consent is cryptographically attributable.
- On-chain attestationsin development
Ethereum Attestation Service entries for verification primitives that need cryptographic durability.
- Community-controlled permanencein development
IPFS, Filecoin or Ceramic for storage that the federation can move or revoke without Saphi’s permission.
- End-to-end encryptionin development
Encrypted channel from the WhatsApp interface through to the Saphi storage layer; keys held by the community where the threat model requires it.
The governance body
Antiari Voces is overseen by a governance council composed of one representative from each consenting federation, a Saphi technical lead, and an independent ethics observer drawn from outside the Saphi organisation. The council meets at the rhythm the federations set, and its decisions bind the operation of the agent.
The names of council members are not listed publicly without their consent. The structure of the council is.
Any community member with a concern about the surface — a recording that should not have been retained, a translation that misrepresents what was said, an alert that was not acted on — can contact the council directly. The contact email is sovereignty@antiari.org. Federations that prefer voice communication can reach the council through the WhatsApp Agent itself by speaking the phrase “consejo de gobernanza” or its equivalent in their language.
This page is a living document.
This document is updated every time a new community joins Antiari Voces, every time a Free, Prior and Informed Consent agreement is renewed or modified, and every time the technical architecture changes. The version date and the changelog are below.