Credit, always
Twelve computational traditions inform the design language — every one credited, none extracted.
About the project
Reshaping how technological agency is shared.
DATA — Decolonial Approaches to Technological Agency — is a research project examining how computing-education spaces perpetuate or resist colonial knowledge structures, across southern and eastern Africa and China.
The model
A quintuple-helix approach.
Most innovation models account for academia, industry and government. We add two partners that extractive models leave out — community and environment — and treat them as equal sources of knowledge and value, not beneficiaries of it.
The aim is sustainable, non-extractive exchange between universities, makerspaces and incubators — tested in real environmental-monitoring technology with partner communities.
In practice
The Innovation Systems Lab.
A ten-week, hands-on programme in sensors and LoRaWAN — the DATA ISL programme, co-designed with the Wits Innovation Centre (WIC). Participants build and deploy real environmental-monitoring nodes, learning the full stack from hardware to data.
It is where the project's ideas about equitable exchange meet a soldering iron: the curriculum, the hardware and the data pipeline are all shared openly with partners.
What guides us
Attribution, not appropriation.
Shared by default
Curriculum, hardware designs and data pipelines are open to partners — the repo is the hub, not a vault.
Community as peer
Partner communities co-design what gets built and measured — they set terms, not just receive tools.
The network
A network of universities.
Universities across southern and eastern Africa and China, working as equals on a shared research agenda.
University of Fort HareUniversity of BotswanaSouthwest Jiaotong UniversityUniversity of ZambiaUniversity of Dar es SalaamNamibia University of Science & Technology
The team
Who runs DATA.
A joint University of Leeds and University of the Witwatersrand partnership, funded by the Horizons — with team members based at Manchester Metropolitan University and Imperial College London.
Dr Julian Brooks
University of Leeds & Manchester Metropolitan University — Principal Investigator
Dr Candice Moore
University of the Witwatersrand — Co-PI
Dr Pierre-Philippe Dechant
University of Leeds — Co-Investigator
Dr Justine Nasejje
University of the Witwatersrand — Co-I, ECR
Dr Rukia Nuermaimaiti
Imperial College London — Co-I, ECR
Work with us.
Partners share resources, tutorials and the full ISL course. Get in touch to join the network.