The Ngā Ara Whakamana Process: Conceptualising and Designing a Process to Engage with Māori Trust Factors in the Development of IT Artefacts

As technology becomes ever more present, there continues to be a disconnect between the IT artefacts created and the needs of the Māori communities that use them or that they are developed. This has led to Māori having a historic mistrust of technology, with many examples highlighting the damage that a lack of consultation, consideration, and engagement with these communities has had. While discussions around this disconnect continue, there is a lack of understanding surrounding trust in technology from a Māori perspective and how to create trusted IT artefacts for Māori. Through an exploration of existing research and interviews with Māori, this research identifies mātauranga, tikanga and taonga as being three of the most significant factors that need to be considered when building trust from a Māori perspective. Each of these three factors are explored in depth with a theoretical understanding of each factor built before looking at how each of these have been applied within the creation of IT artefacts to explore what engagement with each of these would look like. Alongside this, Māori models for both technical spaces and non-technical spaces are explored in the process of conceptualising The Ngā Ara Whakamana Process that can be adopted for the creation of IT artefacts that can be considered trust and engage with Māori factors of trust. Working as part of the Veracity Research Spearhead Project, a trust evaluation algorithm is used as a use case to demonstrate how this process can be used in the development of an IT artefact. For this, an exploration of trust evaluation tools is conducted and the findings and split them into three different categories. Those that focus on trust within networks, those looking at trust in behaviour, and those that consider trust using natural language processing. Ultimately a natural language processing approach is taken with a large language model utilised to increase the level of engagement and context awareness of the Māori factors applied within the development of the algorithm. The key findings from this approach can be used to help address the gaps in the literature surrounding what trust from a Māori perspective looks like. They also offer the potential to drive forward the development of uniquely Māori IT artefacts by providing a path for engaging with the important factors when developing and maintaining IT artefacts developed for, or with Māori.