Introduction

Terrastories is a free and open-source application designed for communities to map, protect, and share place-based stories

Terrastories is a geostorytelling application built to enable Indigenous and other local communities to locate and map their own oral storytelling traditions about places of significant meaning or value to them.

Community members can add places and stories through a user-friendly interface, and make decisions about designating certain stories as private or restricted. Terrastories works both online and offline, so that remote communities can access the application entirely without needing internet connectivity.

Terrastories as used by the Haudenosaunee community at Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve in Ontario, Canada to map traditional knowledge and creation stories.

***Support Limitation Warning***

1. It is not possible to self-host Terrastories, either online or offline, without assistance from a developer. This is due to maintenance issues on current dependencies in the codebase.

   • Documentation to guide someone executing these tasks is currently out of date.

   • We unfortunately are not able to offer this support to you.

2. For using Mapbox Studio maps on our.terrastories.app (or any Terrastories server), your maps need to be v2.x.x compatible. Please ask on the Mapbox Discord for assistance.

3. Feature development is on hold for the foreseeable future.

About this Guide

This site provides an introduction to Terrastories and a collection of training & technical resources to support Terrastories users.

The site is divided into the following sections:

• OVERVIEW Basic information about Terrastories, FAQs, how to get started, and our demo.

• USING TERRASTORIES Detailed instructions for using Terrastories, including the main interface, the member dashboard, and how to operate an offline Terrastories "Field Kit" once set up.

• SETTING UP A TERRASTORIES SERVER Guides for the different ways that you can set up your own Terrastories server in different environments (online, offline "Field Kit", and community mesh network); about offline maps; about the super admin dashboard.

• EXPLORE TERRASTORIES An overview of the Explore Terrastories application, including how to set it up and configure for usage, and how to use it once set up.

• MISCELLANEOUS Other pages on support, troubleshooting, translation, additional references, information for developers, and more.

Use of this guide

Digital Democracy would like both Terrastories and the Terrastories reference materials we develop to help communities find ways to support autonomy, accessibility and collaboration in their projects. We know that people accessing this online resource will have diverse interests, goals, needs, and technical literacy. For this reason, there are a variety of paths to access information and levels of details users may be looking for. All pages in this guide can also be saved in PDF format and printed for use offline.

Feel free to make use of these resources under the creative commons license terms: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International.

Translation We strive to make our tools & resources accessible and available to communities in their local languages. If you'd like to contribute to translating this guide, please see the section on Translating Terrastories to learn how to get started.

Open Source Development

Terrastories and all of Digital Democracy's technical development is open source. Visit the FOR DEVELOPERS section for more information.

Terrastories is a project currently being stewarded by Digital Democracy, a non-profit organization that partners with earth defenders to co-develop technology for social justice, together with a team of volunteer stewards. For more information on Digital Democracy, and how to support our user-centered co-development process visit our website.

Terrastories watercolor by Jennifer Lu, made on the occasion of Ruby by the Bay 2019.