00:00:04
Speaker 1: Unite our voices. We respectfully acknowledge the watchapnon of people as the traditional owners of the land in which this was created.
00:00:26
Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Crystal Kinsella. I'm a proud Jarwin and Braddrew woman, a supply diversity expert and published author. Welcome to Meet the Mob, a series dedicated to showcasing Black excellence in business.
00:00:37
Speaker 3: I get to interview deadly first Nation business owners from around the country and learn about their whye Today, I'm joined by Andrew Dowding from when Yama Digital Solutions. We'll share with us he's why, why he got into business and why he does what he does. So let's kick it off. How are you going, Andrew?
00:00:53
Speaker 1: I'm good, good. Thanks?
00:00:54
Speaker 3: Tell us who you are?
00:00:55
Speaker 1: Who's your role? Okay?
00:00:57
Speaker 4: My name is Andrew Murrambury Doubting and I'm a Nullama traditional owner from the Pilber region up in Norwest w A. And yeah, I'm the managing director for win Yama, which is an indigenous geospatial and cloud consultancy.
00:01:12
Speaker 3: Fantastic, it's the first time we're meeting today. But I was doing all this Google research on you because you were in the Telsha Best of Business Awards and you were the national winner. And when I saw that, you want to back then, because I was a new South Wells finalist, I had to go and you know, Sush you out.
00:01:30
Speaker 4: I was like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was an amazing event for us. I mean we're only three years old now, so I kind of feel like we've come through our kind of startup phase and yeah, to be recognized like amongst some of the really big businesses in Australia was Yeah, it was kind of mind blowing for us. And I mean I think we kind of knew like when we went through that process that we that the judges were interested in us, and we know we went moved through the state finals and then we're kind of looking at the competition as well, of course across the national space and and yeah, look it was a real shock for us because there was some amazing businesses there and we're up against not just all the indigenous businesses but the wider, the wider businesses that Telstra had looked at as well.
00:02:22
Speaker 1: So yeah, we were we were shocked.
00:02:25
Speaker 3: Congratulations is an incredible achievement, most definitely. So it looks three years in tell us, you know, what's your why, like what you get into business for?
00:02:36
Speaker 4: Look, I was, I started off straight out of UNI, and I went up to the community that I'm from, which is up in Roban in the Pilbra, and I started working for our Native Title organization as a language and heritage officer. And yeah, I spent a lot of time working with my elders mapping country. We were mapping place names across across our Nuluma country and and yeah, just as I saw this kind of engagement with like mapping and kind of digital representations of country, just realized that and like, really, you know elders who are really you know, elderly, and they you know, they lived on country and they'd kind of come into towns and they were engaging with this amazing kind of technology to map our places. And it just kind of sparked something in me, like I thought, this is something we need across the country. Really just the age of elders, you know, and we were sort of losing them and we still are, and just the knowledge that they held across country and just making sure that we recorded that stuff and also yeah, like stored it and worked with it and you know, worked on it within our own communities. As well, so we like controlled it. And I was just saying, yeah, the importance of that stuff, and that's what really sparked the kind of the business. You know, I said, I knew, this is something I want to do for the rest of my own life. And yes, here we are, you know, down down the road.
00:04:05
Speaker 3: For Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, well, being able to, I guess, engage with elders with technology. I mean some of what the technology you probably using is so foreign to them in such a different world. But bringing you know, history in the past and story together with the future.
00:04:23
Speaker 4: What it's really surprising is like it's the tech, Like I never had to explain the technology a huge amount to elders. Like just using just really simple software like Google Earth, you know, which is like really commonly used, or Google Maps, elders just intrinsically just kind of understood like how to how to look at it and how to sort of navigate the country like digitally. So I see it as like geospatial, which is like the mapping kind of profession. I just see it as a really easy way to marry like tech and traditions together and it's just kind of a natural fit in some in some cases. And yeah, it was those experiences with elders just navigating country and marking out places that really got me thinking about, like, you know, why aren't we more involved in the tech sector, and why aren't we exploring this as kind of an industry that exists out in the regions as well.
00:05:21
Speaker 3: What's the connectivity like out in those regions, because I could imagine that's pretty hard.
00:05:26
Speaker 4: In the bush it is, yeah, i mean, Robin's like off the not off the grid, but like we've got the mining sector in our region, so the infrastructure is not too bad. But yeah, in remote communities it's yeah, it's terrible. You know, four people would struggle to get four G in some places, which is what you kind of need to run those systems. But surprisingly, in the last couple of years, like infrastructure is starting to get a lot better with things like Starlink, which are like you know, satellite in broadband is getting a lot cheaper and it's getting a lot more accessible. And so we're seeing now all of a sudden, like a change in that, you know, in that environment, people want to understand more about cloud computing, or they want to understand more about the software that they could use to maintain traditions and culture. So so yeah, there is a bit of a change happening since when I was doing my work up after Union.
00:06:21
Speaker 1: I can imagine, I can imagine.
00:06:22
Speaker 3: So what else does I've seen? You've done some you're doing some workshops in community young people involved.
00:06:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we have quite a hard consultancy space, like which is an indigenous geospatial and cloud consultancy and we do a lot of work for public and private sector clients.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: But yeah, the stuff that gets us up.
00:06:44
Speaker 4: Every day in the morning is our Indigenous mapping workshops that we deliver and those are really about teaching indigenous community people mapping techniques or mapping technologies that they might use to protect country or to manage country. And so we run six regional events around Australia and then we run a big national workshop as well, and we bring in partners from the tech sector like Google and Amazon and a range of like NASA as well.
00:07:20
Speaker 1: We had this year at our conferences.
00:07:22
Speaker 4: So we bring in a whole lot of kind of mapping technology leaders and we network them with mob so that people can understand how to use those kind of technologies in their own communities well.
00:07:35
Speaker 3: It's fantastic. So what does the future hold for win Yama, Like, you know, three years in this journey, Like, what's the legacy piece.
00:07:44
Speaker 4: I think it's a hard one to see at the moment, but I really feel like, you know, we're quite early in the tech space with culture and traditions, and I think that really evolves through people's engagement in that space. And that's where I see our legacy being like bringing mob and community it is to technology and kind of just demystifying it a little bit and kind of making a little bit more accessible to people who really need that capability lift and they want to they're really hungry for kind of skills in the tech sector, and so yeah, I kind of feel like where when Yama's functioned as a bit of a tech incubator for indigenous people who we employ, but also like we're trying to kind of spread that through the communities.
00:08:31
Speaker 1: That we work with.
00:08:32
Speaker 4: And yeah, I'd love to look back in a few years and think that we help spark some of that technology, some of the capability lift that we will see into the future that people need when they're engaging with tech.
00:08:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, because there's such a real lack of young Indigenous kids going into sort of stem careers or tech tech careers. So yeah, if there's a feeder ground that you can provide, But I think it's also about them being able to see what's possible or what particular types of careers or pathways are available to them.
00:09:06
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:09:07
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think like geospatial or cloud is ever Like people don't you know, necessarily aspire to be a cloud solution architect when you're from you know, the regions or the bush. But what I would what I would say is that there is a really flourishing tech economy out there in the bush, like indigenous ranges, like the even Native title organizations and kind of people who manage heritage, Like they're all working in software and kind of mapping systems, like some of them are. People are flying drones. There's a whole range of technology that's out there, and it's almost like us kind of trying to like connect the dots between like there's actually a tech sector in your you know, in your community, and like where a kind of skills builder to try and get that under like for people to understand that that's actually a viable career even out in the community. So so yeah, it's I think it's just really about like raising awareness that there are tech careers out there and people might already be amongst them, they just don't kind of quite know yet. And and so yeah, some of the some of the journey for us is to kind of make that a really mainstream conversation like, yeah, I want to be a ranger but in the tech space, you know, like that kind of that kind of idea. So I think it's important to kind of talk about more and more and then the awareness becomes kind of raised, and then it doesn't seem like a massive career change from you know, like being out in the community flying drones down to down to a tech career that you could be on already.
00:10:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like we've got to find a way to get some of those case studies, all those stories out there, because even for myself, like I hadn't heard of this ja spatial mapping at all before, Like I was like, oh, what is this stuff?
00:11:00
Speaker 1: Yeah?
00:11:00
Speaker 4: Yeah, mapping is a is a pretty small niche, and we like that. We like that we're in a small niche and that we you know, that we exist in that space because it's like I said, I think like mapping is a bit of a gateway for the tech sector for indigenous communities. It's something that's natural that they understand country and and you know, they have an affinity with country, and so if you just kind of build on that relationship in the digital space, you're already moving people into the.
00:11:28
Speaker 1: Kind of tech sector.
00:11:29
Speaker 4: So so, yeah, it's something we're really passionate about. And yeah, look, look don't want to continue to do this kind of work into the future.
00:11:38
Speaker 3: I can see your passion comes through every time you speak, which is really great to see. Yeah, So if you had like a really I guess a key message for for the audience out there, whether it be you know, a young young kid in the bullsh or or one of the big guys in the corporate land in tech, you know, what would it be.
00:12:01
Speaker 4: I'd like to have a couple of messages though, right I think in the in the yeah, in the big kind of corporate sector, like we need it. We need allies in this space. Like there's not a lot of indigenous tech companies out there, and even fewer Indigenous people who just come through the you know, like a kind of mainstream kind of training or university degree into the tech sector. And so when win Yama employees people, we've got to we don't just go out there and just you know, advertise and employee like, We've actually got to build our workers, and we need support to do that. We need good contract flow through our organization to continue you know, building like interns and graduates through our programs. And that's yeah, it's a hard slog sometimes when you're in the kind of cut through a consulting space. So yeah, we really need like those allies to think that through and think long term about the projects that we're kind of and the internships that we run and and yeah, for MOB like, I really think that you know, sometimes just people need to take a kind of step back and think about the career path that they want and and that might not necessary if it's in the tech space. It might not necessarily be you know that you need to come down to a university or down to the city to to.
00:13:29
Speaker 1: Follow that dream. That there are tech.
00:13:33
Speaker 4: Spaces up in communities, like in range of programs and different organizations that work with you with with tech, and those are sometimes just you just need to kind of recognize that those are pathways that you could kind of work towards So yeah, i'd say two people, just look around your your communities and think about the tech sector. And then yeah, come to one of our workshops and understand like how how we can build your skills into being a tech worker out in the regions.
00:14:02
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, two really powerful messages there, And I really want to thank you for your time today and really great to meet you as well and learn a little bit more about what you do. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you love it, please share it on your socials with your mob, let's help amplify as many Indigenous businesses as possible and get everyone supporting each other. Thank you.
Speaker 1: Unite our voices. We respectfully acknowledge the watchapnon of people as the traditional owners of the land in which this was created.
00:00:26
Speaker 2: Hi, I'm Crystal Kinsella. I'm a proud Jarwin and Braddrew woman, a supply diversity expert and published author. Welcome to Meet the Mob, a series dedicated to showcasing Black excellence in business.
00:00:37
Speaker 3: I get to interview deadly first Nation business owners from around the country and learn about their whye Today, I'm joined by Andrew Dowding from when Yama Digital Solutions. We'll share with us he's why, why he got into business and why he does what he does. So let's kick it off. How are you going, Andrew?
00:00:53
Speaker 1: I'm good, good. Thanks?
00:00:54
Speaker 3: Tell us who you are?
00:00:55
Speaker 1: Who's your role? Okay?
00:00:57
Speaker 4: My name is Andrew Murrambury Doubting and I'm a Nullama traditional owner from the Pilber region up in Norwest w A. And yeah, I'm the managing director for win Yama, which is an indigenous geospatial and cloud consultancy.
00:01:12
Speaker 3: Fantastic, it's the first time we're meeting today. But I was doing all this Google research on you because you were in the Telsha Best of Business Awards and you were the national winner. And when I saw that, you want to back then, because I was a new South Wells finalist, I had to go and you know, Sush you out.
00:01:30
Speaker 4: I was like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was an amazing event for us. I mean we're only three years old now, so I kind of feel like we've come through our kind of startup phase and yeah, to be recognized like amongst some of the really big businesses in Australia was Yeah, it was kind of mind blowing for us. And I mean I think we kind of knew like when we went through that process that we that the judges were interested in us, and we know we went moved through the state finals and then we're kind of looking at the competition as well, of course across the national space and and yeah, look it was a real shock for us because there was some amazing businesses there and we're up against not just all the indigenous businesses but the wider, the wider businesses that Telstra had looked at as well.
00:02:22
Speaker 1: So yeah, we were we were shocked.
00:02:25
Speaker 3: Congratulations is an incredible achievement, most definitely. So it looks three years in tell us, you know, what's your why, like what you get into business for?
00:02:36
Speaker 4: Look, I was, I started off straight out of UNI, and I went up to the community that I'm from, which is up in Roban in the Pilbra, and I started working for our Native Title organization as a language and heritage officer. And yeah, I spent a lot of time working with my elders mapping country. We were mapping place names across across our Nuluma country and and yeah, just as I saw this kind of engagement with like mapping and kind of digital representations of country, just realized that and like, really, you know elders who are really you know, elderly, and they you know, they lived on country and they'd kind of come into towns and they were engaging with this amazing kind of technology to map our places. And it just kind of sparked something in me, like I thought, this is something we need across the country. Really just the age of elders, you know, and we were sort of losing them and we still are, and just the knowledge that they held across country and just making sure that we recorded that stuff and also yeah, like stored it and worked with it and you know, worked on it within our own communities. As well, so we like controlled it. And I was just saying, yeah, the importance of that stuff, and that's what really sparked the kind of the business. You know, I said, I knew, this is something I want to do for the rest of my own life. And yes, here we are, you know, down down the road.
00:04:05
Speaker 3: For Yeah, that's incredible. I mean, well, being able to, I guess, engage with elders with technology. I mean some of what the technology you probably using is so foreign to them in such a different world. But bringing you know, history in the past and story together with the future.
00:04:23
Speaker 4: What it's really surprising is like it's the tech, Like I never had to explain the technology a huge amount to elders. Like just using just really simple software like Google Earth, you know, which is like really commonly used, or Google Maps, elders just intrinsically just kind of understood like how to how to look at it and how to sort of navigate the country like digitally. So I see it as like geospatial, which is like the mapping kind of profession. I just see it as a really easy way to marry like tech and traditions together and it's just kind of a natural fit in some in some cases. And yeah, it was those experiences with elders just navigating country and marking out places that really got me thinking about, like, you know, why aren't we more involved in the tech sector, and why aren't we exploring this as kind of an industry that exists out in the regions as well.
00:05:21
Speaker 3: What's the connectivity like out in those regions, because I could imagine that's pretty hard.
00:05:26
Speaker 4: In the bush it is, yeah, i mean, Robin's like off the not off the grid, but like we've got the mining sector in our region, so the infrastructure is not too bad. But yeah, in remote communities it's yeah, it's terrible. You know, four people would struggle to get four G in some places, which is what you kind of need to run those systems. But surprisingly, in the last couple of years, like infrastructure is starting to get a lot better with things like Starlink, which are like you know, satellite in broadband is getting a lot cheaper and it's getting a lot more accessible. And so we're seeing now all of a sudden, like a change in that, you know, in that environment, people want to understand more about cloud computing, or they want to understand more about the software that they could use to maintain traditions and culture. So so yeah, there is a bit of a change happening since when I was doing my work up after Union.
00:06:21
Speaker 1: I can imagine, I can imagine.
00:06:22
Speaker 3: So what else does I've seen? You've done some you're doing some workshops in community young people involved.
00:06:29
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we have quite a hard consultancy space, like which is an indigenous geospatial and cloud consultancy and we do a lot of work for public and private sector clients.
00:06:41
Speaker 1: But yeah, the stuff that gets us up.
00:06:44
Speaker 4: Every day in the morning is our Indigenous mapping workshops that we deliver and those are really about teaching indigenous community people mapping techniques or mapping technologies that they might use to protect country or to manage country. And so we run six regional events around Australia and then we run a big national workshop as well, and we bring in partners from the tech sector like Google and Amazon and a range of like NASA as well.
00:07:20
Speaker 1: We had this year at our conferences.
00:07:22
Speaker 4: So we bring in a whole lot of kind of mapping technology leaders and we network them with mob so that people can understand how to use those kind of technologies in their own communities well.
00:07:35
Speaker 3: It's fantastic. So what does the future hold for win Yama, Like, you know, three years in this journey, Like, what's the legacy piece.
00:07:44
Speaker 4: I think it's a hard one to see at the moment, but I really feel like, you know, we're quite early in the tech space with culture and traditions, and I think that really evolves through people's engagement in that space. And that's where I see our legacy being like bringing mob and community it is to technology and kind of just demystifying it a little bit and kind of making a little bit more accessible to people who really need that capability lift and they want to they're really hungry for kind of skills in the tech sector, and so yeah, I kind of feel like where when Yama's functioned as a bit of a tech incubator for indigenous people who we employ, but also like we're trying to kind of spread that through the communities.
00:08:31
Speaker 1: That we work with.
00:08:32
Speaker 4: And yeah, I'd love to look back in a few years and think that we help spark some of that technology, some of the capability lift that we will see into the future that people need when they're engaging with tech.
00:08:46
Speaker 3: Yeah, because there's such a real lack of young Indigenous kids going into sort of stem careers or tech tech careers. So yeah, if there's a feeder ground that you can provide, But I think it's also about them being able to see what's possible or what particular types of careers or pathways are available to them.
00:09:06
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:09:07
Speaker 4: Yeah, I don't think like geospatial or cloud is ever Like people don't you know, necessarily aspire to be a cloud solution architect when you're from you know, the regions or the bush. But what I would what I would say is that there is a really flourishing tech economy out there in the bush, like indigenous ranges, like the even Native title organizations and kind of people who manage heritage, Like they're all working in software and kind of mapping systems, like some of them are. People are flying drones. There's a whole range of technology that's out there, and it's almost like us kind of trying to like connect the dots between like there's actually a tech sector in your you know, in your community, and like where a kind of skills builder to try and get that under like for people to understand that that's actually a viable career even out in the community. So so yeah, it's I think it's just really about like raising awareness that there are tech careers out there and people might already be amongst them, they just don't kind of quite know yet. And and so yeah, some of the some of the journey for us is to kind of make that a really mainstream conversation like, yeah, I want to be a ranger but in the tech space, you know, like that kind of that kind of idea. So I think it's important to kind of talk about more and more and then the awareness becomes kind of raised, and then it doesn't seem like a massive career change from you know, like being out in the community flying drones down to down to a tech career that you could be on already.
00:10:45
Speaker 3: Yeah, I feel like we've got to find a way to get some of those case studies, all those stories out there, because even for myself, like I hadn't heard of this ja spatial mapping at all before, Like I was like, oh, what is this stuff?
00:11:00
Speaker 1: Yeah?
00:11:00
Speaker 4: Yeah, mapping is a is a pretty small niche, and we like that. We like that we're in a small niche and that we you know, that we exist in that space because it's like I said, I think like mapping is a bit of a gateway for the tech sector for indigenous communities. It's something that's natural that they understand country and and you know, they have an affinity with country, and so if you just kind of build on that relationship in the digital space, you're already moving people into the.
00:11:28
Speaker 1: Kind of tech sector.
00:11:29
Speaker 4: So so, yeah, it's something we're really passionate about. And yeah, look, look don't want to continue to do this kind of work into the future.
00:11:38
Speaker 3: I can see your passion comes through every time you speak, which is really great to see. Yeah, So if you had like a really I guess a key message for for the audience out there, whether it be you know, a young young kid in the bullsh or or one of the big guys in the corporate land in tech, you know, what would it be.
00:12:01
Speaker 4: I'd like to have a couple of messages though, right I think in the in the yeah, in the big kind of corporate sector, like we need it. We need allies in this space. Like there's not a lot of indigenous tech companies out there, and even fewer Indigenous people who just come through the you know, like a kind of mainstream kind of training or university degree into the tech sector. And so when win Yama employees people, we've got to we don't just go out there and just you know, advertise and employee like, We've actually got to build our workers, and we need support to do that. We need good contract flow through our organization to continue you know, building like interns and graduates through our programs. And that's yeah, it's a hard slog sometimes when you're in the kind of cut through a consulting space. So yeah, we really need like those allies to think that through and think long term about the projects that we're kind of and the internships that we run and and yeah, for MOB like, I really think that you know, sometimes just people need to take a kind of step back and think about the career path that they want and and that might not necessary if it's in the tech space. It might not necessarily be you know that you need to come down to a university or down to the city to to.
00:13:29
Speaker 1: Follow that dream. That there are tech.
00:13:33
Speaker 4: Spaces up in communities, like in range of programs and different organizations that work with you with with tech, and those are sometimes just you just need to kind of recognize that those are pathways that you could kind of work towards So yeah, i'd say two people, just look around your your communities and think about the tech sector. And then yeah, come to one of our workshops and understand like how how we can build your skills into being a tech worker out in the regions.
00:14:02
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, two really powerful messages there, And I really want to thank you for your time today and really great to meet you as well and learn a little bit more about what you do. Thanks for listening to today's episode. If you love it, please share it on your socials with your mob, let's help amplify as many Indigenous businesses as possible and get everyone supporting each other. Thank you.
