Kemi Owo · Dallas + Lagos
Two decades inside the world's digital infrastructure taught me to see systems as power. The rest of my life has been a slow conversation with the ground itself. This page is where those threads meet.
A short introduction
I am a builder, a scholar, and a person who has spent a long time paying attention to land. I came up through enterprise infrastructure — datacenters, cloud, network security — and learned what it means to design systems at the scale of continents. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I started asking a quieter question: who reads the earth, and who is allowed to write the answers down?
That question has shaped almost everything I have done since. My intellectual life lives at the intersection of environmental data, geographic information systems, indigenous ecological knowledge, and the decolonial politics of how that knowledge gets organized. My professional life is what happens when you decide that asking the question is not enough and the answer has to be built.
Three things I keep returning to
01
The earth as archive
Every landscape is a record of decisions — about cultivation, about migration, about who was allowed to stay. I am interested in the discipline of reading that record honestly, with the technical instruments we now have, and with the humility to know the people who lived on the land already knew most of what the satellites are now confirming.
02
Data as negotiation
When you can measure something, you can name it. When you can name it, you can trade on it. When you can trade on it, you can govern it. Most of the world's environmental data was built by, and benefits, the people doing the buying. I am interested in what changes when the data is built by and benefits the people doing the living.
03
Infrastructure as care
The infrastructure decisions we make today are how we will tend or fail to tend each other across the next century. A pipeline is a moral document. A satellite is a moral document. A GIS is a moral document. The question I ask of every system I build: what is this infrastructure for, and who is it tending?
What I'm building, briefly
I am building something I have wanted to build for most of my career. It draws on the data infrastructure work that filled my first two decades, the years I have spent studying the cultural and ecological systems of the African continent, and the conviction that the next era of African economic participation has to be built on data the continent owns.
I am keeping the details quiet for now — building takes the energy that talking about building consumes — but I am happy to share more in conversation with people whose work overlaps thoughtfully with this one.
Get in touch
Investors, fellow builders in environmental data and GIS, scholars working at the intersections of land and knowledge, and anyone curious about any of the above — please write. I read everything that comes through.
Email mekemi@thallos.io