Aurora Martin called me from her car on her way up to Yakima, Washington, a community about two hours west of Seattle, and just outside the Yakama Indian Reservation. She was headed to meet with coordinators at Heritage University, a college situated within the reservation, to set up a partnership around the Rural American Digital Lab (RAD Lab), a social justice tech incubation project within Martin’s umbrella organization, popUPjustice.
As Martin explains it, RAD Lab is set up to be a tech innovation center akin to Stanford’s CodeX—a space where students, educators and community members can collaborate with one another on new uses and iterations of technology. The only difference, she said, was the national prestige attached to the institution.
