Current focus · Co-funding partners invited
The first gathering of the Pacific region’s Indigenous AI builders. Nine island nations, twelve days, one marae, one outer island and one reef. Hosted by Mara.Earth, with Current AI.
29 NOV – 9 DEC 2026 · AOTEAROA & KŪKI ʻĀIRANI
Why this, why now
The dominant path builds in isolation: ever-larger models, cultures and languages treated as raw material. The Pacific has another way of working. Community-rooted builders sharing at the speed of trust, smaller models, curated data, low-resource languages, specific tools for specific contexts.
Te Hiku Media has already shown what that looks like. They built speech recognition for te reo Māori from language their own community donated, kept the data, and wrote the Kaitiakitanga Licence so it could not be taken. ĀIO opens on their marae because they have answered the question the rest of us are still asking.
Frugal AI, rooted in place. Match tools to real problems. Prioritise local impact. Bigger isn’t always better. The gathering exists to turn that from a slogan into a shared roadmap, a common mission and an honest issues list, agreed face to face by the people who will carry it.
The voyage
Pōtahi Marae · Te Hiku Media · the Kupe Waka Centre at Te Aurere
A marae stay in the far north. Everyone sleeps, eats and works in one house. Whakawhanaungatanga (connection first), manaakitanga (care for guests), kanohi ki te kanohi (face to face). We visit Te Hiku Media where they live and work, and the waka builders at Te Aurere.
Karen Hao and Timnit Gebru have both championed Te Hiku Media’s work, and we hope to hold places to thank them in person.
Future site of Te Are Vananga o Oneunga
Three days on an outer island of around two hundred and sixty people, received by the Maʻuke community and camped on the family land at Oneunga where a tech are vananga (house of higher learning) with a research lab is planned. It will teach Cook Islands young people tech, AI, sustainability and climate resilience, and build an open-source blueprint for a thriving, resilient village society.
What we achieve together on Maʻuke will be open-sourced so any community can benefit.
Where the roadmap gets made
Rarotonga sits at the heart of Marae Moana: 1.9 million square kilometres of ocean, the entire exclusive economic zone, placed under a single act of protection. The Cook Islands did not protect part of its ocean. It protected all of it.
Here the ecosystem is woven. Nine island nations, Current AI and its international grantees in one room, with master navigators, plantations and the taro patch between sessions. Meaningful relationships cannot be built over email. This is a relational investment that enables intergenerational transmission and change.
Who is in the room
Nine island nations, a community base of nearly eighteen million people, navigating a new frontier of AI together. Each person brings a working practice into the room.
Knowledge sharing
Master navigator · Pwo
Founder and chair of Te Puna Marama, reviving the traditional art of navigation on Rarotonga. The gathering is facilitated with the wayfinding process itself, the same process that revived celestial navigation after six hundred years.
It has been a dream of mine to come home and teach the knowledge of traditional wayfinding. I have been very fortunate to be one of two people that have been gifted this knowledge in the Cook Islands. Therefore it becomes a responsibility for me to teach my own people these skills.Te Puna Marama
Rongoā Māori · Tīwaiwaka
A senior rongoā practitioner and expert witness to the Wai 262 claim on mātauranga Māori. His Tīwaiwaka kaupapa holds that people are not the masters of the mauri but part of it, a question worth putting to anyone building intelligent systems. Joins us on Maʻuke.
TīwaiwakaRegenerative agriculture & trade
Led by Rhona Conn in Papua New Guinea, Milne Bay Organics grows the cacao for Ao Cacao, founded by Thomas Netana Wright. Together they build tools that let communities take regenerative agriculture into artisanal products, small batch and high grade. Thomas speaks on agricultural trade at Oneunga.
Ao CacaoEnvironment & ocean · Kūki ʻĀirani
President of Te Ipukarea Society, the Cook Islands environmental NGO incorporated in 1996 to help care for te ipukarea (our heritage) and to advocate for a sustainable, healthy, biodiverse and beautiful environment. June speaks on the ocean at Oneunga.
Te Ipukarea SocietyJoined by
Current AI’s four community-driven AI grantees are invited to join the Pacific cohort once co-funding is committed, alongside Karen Hao and Timnit Gebru.
What co-funding does
Ends isolated building across nine nations. Restores communication, collaboration and the free flow of what works.
Trusted skills and expertise shared across the Pacific and Current AI’s grantee regions, building tangible outcomes together.
Frugal AI, people of place, tools matched to real problems where impact must be positive. Auditable, not aspirational.
A smaller, faster-moving ecosystem host, shifting the region away from reliance on platforms it does not control.
Current AI has committed NZD 50,000 on the condition of co-funding. A commitment now both funds the voyage and opens the invitation to their four grantee organisations from Africa, the Middle East and the Amazon.
Co-funders are welcomed as part of the gathering, not as a logo. Audited accounts and a full budget are available on request.
The ask
Every cost sits under the part of the gathering it belongs to. Te Kao is met in full by Current AI. What follows is what remains, with a fifteen percent contingency.
Led by Savannah Petero-Solomona (Te Ātiawa, Māori Kūki ʻĀirani, Rūrutu) · Mara.Earth. Funds are received by Te Pu-a-Nga Maara Charitable Trust & Te Hapai Ō as fiscal host. Audited accounts available upon request.
| Te Kao, Aotearoa4 days · marae, catering, kapa haka, weavers, koha | Funded |
| Maʻuke, Kūki ʻĀirani3 days · camp, catering by the community, welcome | 27,900 |
| Rarotonga, Kūki ʻĀirani5 days · shared accommodation with meeting rooms, catering, vans | 47,370 |
| International flightsDelegates to Auckland and Rarotonga, return | 72,000 |
| Charter flightsRarotonga to Maʻuke and back, the only way to reach the island as a group | 40,000 |
| Contingency15% | 28,090 |
| Total sought NZD | 215,360 |