Indigenous IT consultancy using AWS to educate remote communities

Perth-based indigenous IT consultancy Winyama Digital Solutions is conducting digital inclusion initiatives to close the digital gap in remote communities using Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Co-founded in 2018, Winyama specialises in location intelligence, digital mapping and cloud solutions. The company aims to enable young indigenous people seeking careers in technology, and upskill indigenous ranger groups, by delivering training across Australia via the cloud.

This training focuses on cloud-based geospatial technologies which indigenous people can use to better care for their land and the environment. Winyama trains communities that typically live in areas that lack access to connectivity, digital skills and the equipment needed for geospatial software.

The company’s Indigenous Mapping Workshop Australia program is classroom-based training for indigenous ranger groups and native title corporations, teaching students how to use geospatial tools for capturing data in the field.

“Since we started in 2019, we’ve trained over 440 Indigenous people across Australia. In the first year, we discovered how time and resource intensive it was to prepare for each in-person training session,” Winyama managing director and co-founder Andrew Morumburri Dowding said.

“We needed an online training environment to help standardise the types of training we were delivering, and how each person accessed it.”

This need resulted in Winyama’s cloud-native approach. It now uses AWS to create a virtual training environment and AWS AppStream to make training accessible through a URL provided to all attendees so they can use their own laptops or tablet computers.

Winyama said “this approach reduced setup time from 2.5 days to minutes, and the estimated cost from $40,000 for 20 high-end workstations, to approximately $125 to run a day’s worth of on-demand training for 20 participants”.

AWS helped expand the availability of Winyama’s training, enabling it to deliver 176 virtual labs since September 2020. The training programs included community rangers surveying geographic areas including the Great Barrier Reef and the Outback Hinterland Region.

“It’s an incredibly scalable model and can create additional revenue opportunities for ranger groups using a culturally appropriate service,” Winyama junior solution architect Jaden Dzubiel said.

Winyama recently joined the AWS Think Big for Small Business Program, which provides staff members with AWS mentoring to help them in their AWS Partner journey and build, market and sell with AWS.

In the recent 2022-23 budget, the Australian government announced a $2.5 million investment over 5 years to establish a First Nations digital advisory group examining the effective design and delivery of digital inclusion initiatives.